In any large enterprise, the data resides in diverse data sources, ranging from text files to different databases, XML, data marts, EJB and SOAP data sources. Read this white paper to know how Repro provides data extraction support from a large variety of data sources.

Overview

In any large enterprise, the data resides in diverse data sources, ranging from text files to different databases, XML, data marts, EJB and SOAP data sources. The data integration strategy of the enterprise may be to create a consolidated data source or expose the diverse data sources to the application level, depending on various factors like complexity, data volume etc.
Repro is capable of generating reports out of OLAP data sources. Alternatively, it is also possible to generate reports that are composed out of data collected from heterogeneous data sources, thereby integrating the islands of information in an enterprise into meaningful reports.

Repro Reports – not the end of the value chain

Until recently, enterprise reports were considered to be the last node in the information extraction step, where the reports were either meant to describe an existing business situation or provide meaningful information and inferences that can improve a business situation. In today’s enterprise reporting, a report can be input to further reports and the Enterprise Reporting solutions should be able to provide the infrastructure to make that possible. In Repro, reports can be generated in XML–based standard, thereby ensuring reuse of the report data in other reports, and facilitate easy transformation into other XML-based standard (e.g. XBRL) for distribution.

Reusing Data Source Queries

Repro data source queries act as the meta data view of the corporate information. These queries are prepared by users having an understanding of the corporate information sources. These query objects are reusable across reports and thus relieves the user of the need to compose fresh queries for every report. Report designers can concentrate on the presentation aspects like layout, color and font without having to worry about the actual structure of the corporate data distribution.

Diverse Data Sources

Repro has data extraction support from a large variety of data source of data sources.

JDBC Compliant Database

Repro supports JDBC connectivity for connecting to databases. Commercial, free and open source JDBC drivers are available for almost all relational databases. Consequently, this unleashes the power to all databases supporting database connectivity.

XML

It is possible to connect to XML located in the file system or from a Web Service.

Java Beans

Repro can seamlessly harvest data from all kinds of Java datasets, ranging from EJBs, custom Java classes and Java collection classes. This architecture provides an efficient access mechanism to custom business logic found in the developer's object model, instead of forcing a redundant fetch of the data from the database.

CSV

The CSV (Comma separated value) file format is a data file format that is supported by almost all spreadsheet software (such as Excel, Calc, and Gnumeric), making it ubiquitous for handling tabular data. Data input from a spreadsheet is very common in an enterprise reporting application – and hence Repro has support for the CSV file as an input data source

Office 2007 Documents

Office 2007 documents will have XML as the default file formats. Since Repro has an extensive support of XML as a data source, it is possible to have Office 2007 documents as an input data source for Repro.

Online Data Source – RSS feeds

RSS is a family of web feed formats, specified in XML and used for Web syndication. Support for RSS as a data source is imperative for reporting that involve providing summaries of web content from dynamic web-sites. If is easy to associate RSS feeds as a data source in Repro.