Operational Report Development

This is the start page for report development. It tells you, as a developer of reports, what you need to know about reports and their implementations. It also describe the tools and skills needed. The main report development tools in use are IFS Developer Studio and IFS Report Designer.

Here is the full process for developing reports:

1. Use IFS Developer Studio to create or amend the report model.
2. From the model, you generate a schema (XSD) that serves as the input for developing report layouts.
3. Generate or amend the Report Definition (RDF). The RDF should produce a XML and fill the result set with the intended data. Deploy the RDF and test it.
4. Bring the schema into IFS Report Designer and create or amend the layout (RDL)
5. Deploy your layout. This can be done from the Report Designer tool, Solution Manager or it can be included in a delivery and imported by the installer.

You might also begin your development process on any of the above steps, depending on your intents.

IFS Report Designer produces RDL-files that the Report Formatter in runtime applies to the XML-data produced by the RDF to generate PDF-files.
The Report Formatter is a J2EE application running in IFS Extended sever.

In summary:

• to develop new IFS Report Designer reports, you need to set up an environment for Services Layer Development, since you use IFS Developer Studio to make modeling work.
• to edit layouts for IFS Report Designer, you install the development tools for Base Server Development, that include the IFS Report Designer tool.

Contents

• About Operational Reports
• Report Modeling
• Data Assembly
• Layout Design
• Route Reports based on Content
• Development of Crystal Reports
• Development of Report Plug-ins
• Development of SSRS Reports