Srinivas Thonse

Reporting is an important functionality in software business applications and is now increasingly required for XML data. Applications typically generate reports by extracting relevant information from a database. Applications that don't use the underlying database for information storage adopt XSL/FO and proprietary techniques. Other solutions rely on migrating data to a database to enable reporting. These techniques are inflexible and expensive for reporting XML data. A cost-effective and flexible reporting framework allows quick report creation and keeps the reporting independent of the existing code base and the XML data source. This article examines a reporting framework that uses Report Templates and XQuery to fit the bill. The report templates contain static content and formatting information for the report (in HTML) and embedded XQuery constructs to generate... (more)