Re: Pull data from several reports into dashboard

Lloyd,

What you seem to be calling "reports" sound more like "queries" to me. A report in my mind would be documents formatted for printing rather than formatted for a window, and generally output from batch jobs rather than interactive, and would generate static stream files rather than streaming browser output. But you seem to be looking for an interactive dashboard solution. Is that right?

It also seems a little odd that you're talking about pulling data from "reports" rather than pulling data from a database. If a report were formatted as HTML, are you asking about extracting data from HTML? And formatting it differently?

I came up with a partial solution for generating static stream files, formatted with printing in mind, generated from RPG programs, generally submitted to batch, stored on the IFS, and accessed from an indexed catalog. But that's not what you seem to be talking about.

My idea of a dashboard is an application that pulls data together into high-level summaries and graphs. And used interactively.

Nathan.



----- Original Message ----
From: "lgoodbar@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx" <lgoodbar@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: web400@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Sent: Wednesday, November 19, 2008 8:14:10 AM
Subject: [WEB400] Pull data from several reports into dashboard

Over the years we've developed many inhouse browser-based reports. Our
supervisors run several of these reports daily to create a poor-man's
scorecard / dashboard. I've been asked to automate this process - to
create an electronic/web dashboard based on the existing manual process.



Most of the reports are hosted from i5/OS' web server, and a couple from
ASP.NET web pages. First blush seems that HTTPAPI can retrieve the
generated report, but I'm stuck with pulling specific data from the
reports. What tools do you use to accomplish this?



The reports were created as stand-alone entities and weren't intended to
be pulled together. All the business logic / calculations are internal
to the report. Does it make sense to create custom HTML-like tags to
surround the data? In the HTTPAPI vein, can Expat parse a HTML document?



Obviously I'm trying to keep the dashboard process on the i. All
suggestions welcome.



Thanks,

Loyd

--

Loyd Goodbar

Business Systems

BorgWarner Shared Services

662-473-5713