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Sophisticated Ellipse reports using Output Designer, how to extend

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javaellipse

Programmer
Mar 5, 2002
5
CA
Output Designer Server is Mincom's software product that allows report formatting mechanism in form of MS Word Document or HTML. The way it works as follows:
Ellipse/MIMS online report request is substituted to a custom application running on Ellipse Server which generates
XML like output file which is sent to Output Designer Server. Output Designer expects XML input document. XML parsed for various tags Word Template parsed for bookmarks.
XML tags matched against template bookmarks and processed accordingly. Output Designer prints Word Document to any printer on the network. It can e-mail also. This works fine,
and different kind of Documents are printed in our company(checks, Job Cards etc.).
In fact there are prewritten XML reports such as MSRXWJA
etc. in Ellipse. The biggest problem is if you want to create new one or modify an existing report Mincom Report Link tool has to be used to create and compile report RDL code. And Report Link is not that flexible if complicated data processing required or complicated XML structure of the document is needed. You can scratch your head off trying to figure out what those errors are when compiling RDL. Fortunately there is a fine way to overcome limitations of Report Link and Ellipse file base architecture.
1. Create RDL report only to catch report request parameters and write them to a file.
2. Trough batch.tbl disable printing of this file and create
a subtask of the process as following:
Report1 MSRXWJ MSRXWJ -Description XML_Work_order_Job_Card -Report
Report1 MSRXWJ EXEC -PARAM run_YourApplication.sh
Ellipse Background Event Scheduler can run any Unix shell script, registered in batch.tbl file. The shell script can run any custom application which reads the parameters file(from step 1), gets, process data and creates XML file for Output Designer.
3. Send the file to Output Designer for printing.

Working Solution:
1. Report Link had been used only to catch request parameters.
2. Sub task runs shell, which starts Java Application.
Java Application gets data from database using JDBC, process the data and creates the XML file and finaly sends it to Output Designer.
Everything is done in the Ellipse Report Requet Process framework and runs very smooth with unlimited solutions to
business requirements.

Have fun

 
How does this approach work on an IBM ?
 
This approach works fine on IBM, since our Ellipse 5.2.1
is running on AIX Version 4 and custom java application is running on the same server.

Output Designer is Windows 2000 server.

 
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