I'm looking for a reporting engine/UI that can be integrated into a product, which has a UI along the lines of Google Analytics' Custom Reports builder. Is anyone aware of such a thing?
The data is in our case is not page views/visitors/etc, but is similar in nature, in that there are limited entities or types of data, but each entity has many attributes/columns and many different ways of aggregating data (or in GA-style speak, metrics and dimensions).
The analytics-style UI is very intuitive and allows many reports to be created in powerful ways, without having to know SQL.
I have preference for a web-based tool (seeing that it is 2010 and this is a web app -- I mention only because it seems the vast majority of reporting tools still have only a non-web-based creation tool).
Example UI screenshot:
alt text http://gregmaclellan.com/analytics-custom-search.png
you can drag metrics from the sidebar into the dotted rectangles - these become the columns (and determine the underlying entities used for the data)
You can select dimensions to add grouping
Have a look at myDBR, a web-based reporting solution that is easy to install and allows you to create reports within minutes.
myDBR also features a report wizard and query builder that allows you to build reports without extensive SQL knowledge.
Cacti is similar to Google Analytics but its more powerful as it also gives the administrators insight into resource consumption.
While not quite as elegant, Report Builder 1.0 coupled with a model of the datast can possibly provide a solution. The table/data structure can be defined in the model to provide drag and drop placement of columns into a grid (one example - it does charts also), and you could define the Dimensions via the use of Filters. Best part is it is free and comes with MS SQL. More info on Report Builder
Related
I'd love to be able to create an interactive something like the picture below to include in an app - rows represent partners that we'd work with, and columns represent how many widgets they are assigned to build per month (those numbers come from the partner based on their resources, availability, etc.) The goal is to track how many of the expected widgets were created, how many were started and cancelled, etc. according to how mnay "slots" were allocated. Clicking on a "box" would cycle through the colors to indicate the status of that widget. All data would be stored in the underlying CDS entities.
This UI is familiar to my team, which is currently based in Excel, but want to transfer into a custom widget I can surface in our Model-driven App in CDS.
Any suggestions on a web UI framework/approach/etc. to help me get started? I don't want to recreate something that already exists somewhere, or start building from scratch something that there is a cool (yet unknown to me) UI framework that would make this easier than starting from complete scratch.
PowerApps component framework is the way to go. Typescript is the language to be developed on and Dynamics context awareness is main plus for this PCF control.
As far as I know, there is no control available for this. Check here
PCF builder is a good place to start the development.
In our Dynamics CRM online instance, we've created several dashboards for the monthly performance review. In total we got 24 lists and charts.
Problem: We've got 16 sales-teams/regions. So, when our CEO is meeting with one team, he needs to filter down 24 lists.
We see several solutions:
a) Introduce Power BI: So far we didn't use it we are reluctant to introduce it due to some weaknesses it has.
b) Clone the 24 charts, lists and dashboards. Doing it once would be feasible but afterwards we would have a maintenance nightmare.
c) This is where you come in: Is there a plugin, workaround, script or some other idea how to do this?
You can build a custom HTML webresource to embed in dashboard, develop with bootstrap & webapi calls to pull the data. Open source js charts, jQuery grids, cool controls to visualize.
My choice is PowerBI because of powerful slice & dice, great visualization & easy to build.
Lot of charts, views, dashboards are going to be maintenance nightmare. Though we have xrmtoolbox for managing certain things.
I'm currently in an internship and i have to create a whole BI application.
I think i'll use pentaho, and I have to use just open source component.
I know that Pentaho Analyzer is not free
My question is: Is saiku an equivalent of analyzer?
If yes, can I use it with pentaho instead of analyzer?
thks
I'm the developer of Pivot4J project and want to share my (subjective) opinion on the subject.
First, as though you righteously assumed Pivot4J to be more of an API than an application, it does not always mean you need to write lot of code to use it.
We also have a Pentaho BI plugin which does not require any coding and has comparable features to Saiku plugin, though it's targeted toward the yet unreleased Pentaho 5.0 platform.
And our sample application provides most of the functionalities that JPivot web application has, even though it lacks a data source configuration feature which will be soon to be fixed.
Compared to Saiku, I think each project has its own advantage in different scenarios.
Saiku has a much lightweight architecture on the client side than our sample application and the plugin, so it can be deployed and embedded virtually anywhere.
While it's not much difficult to create a full REST style analytic application with Pivot4J, our current sample and plugin applications require at least a Servlet container to run and are more difficult to be embeded than Saiku in certain environment.
On the other hand, as Pivot4J is designed to be UI independent API from the start, it could provide more flexibility than Saiku in my opinion to developers when they want to build their own application on top of it, or intend to customize core behaviors of the API.
For example, if you want to use Pivot4J with your own application which is build with ExtJS, DhtmlX, or any other UI toolkits, it'd be much easier to achieve a seamless integration with Pivot4J, as it provides you with convenient abstract extension points to do that.
Finally, if you're familiar with Javascript you might find working with Saiku easier as it delegates most of the UI related works to the client side.
On the other hand, if you're an old school Java developer like me :) you might find our sample application to be easier to understand and work with, as there's virtually no custom script involved and everything is done on the server side with JSF component model.
To conclude, I'd like to say that Pivot4J is not just an API which cannot be used without writing much codes as it already includes quite feature complete Pentaho BI plugin for the upcoming 5.0 release of the platform. And as Pivot4J and Saiku take rather different approach from each other, each has its own strength and advantage which could be leveraged to suit the specific use case.
Yes of course. Both the tools use the same underlying OLAP engine - Mondrian. Saiku is essentially the same as analyzer providing many of the same features - however it has a different architecture which additionally makes it very embeddable and pluggable. Plus Saiku can be used standalone too if you want to.
Check out the demo at dev.analytical-labs.com to see what it can do.
Also for help you wont find many tools with such a great community - hook up with them on Freenode IRC at either ##Pentaho or ##Saiku depending on your questions!
Pentaho is the right choice for OS BI too - Presume you looked at Jaspersoft as well? Worth a look but you'll no doubt realise the features are better in Pentaho.
Have you think about a pure javascript UI to pivot your olap cubes? There is one such component calls WebPivotTable at http://webpivottable.com
Jpivot, saiku and pentaho are all based on olap4j API so that they all need a java server side service. WebPivotTable use AJAX call to xmla service directly so that it can be used to pivot any xmla OLAP server, like mondrian, SSAS, iccube. Since it doesn't tie up with any java back end and also it is pure javascript based, you can easily integrate it into any website or web application.
I've been tasked to develop a small web application for my company, and my initial plan was to use the Zend framework with Doctrine as this allowed for all the necessary features I needed. However, recently I came across a Joomla application builder called Fabrik which seems to have a lot of potential. My question is if anyone here has used it and if so, what your experiences were? Is it a stable, secure platform? Is it easy to use and does it allow for simple to more complex applications? And finally, how does it compare to one of the more established frameworks such as Zend or Cake etc. Any info regarding to your experiences would be appreciated.
I have not gone beyond a proof-of-concept using Fabrik, so I'm far from being an expert. What I've found so far is that Fabrik installs and configures easily in the Joomla environment and it's easy to get up and running. It's quite easy to get tables of output from the database and it's possible to do JOINs to combine data from multiple tables. The output format can be customized using CSS but I haven't been able to really customize the structure and I'm not sure it's possible to combine multiple tables into one report for example.
It's very easy to create a form that is an exact match of a table, so for data entry, it's very easy to set up a form to edit table data.
I haven't found it to be very flexible for creating a custom search form or a form that takes input from two drop-down list boxes and does a query based on the selected items in both lists.
The advanced search function that is provided is fairly powerful, but doesn't fit seamlessly into the Joomla environment so I think this feature needs to work to be something I would roll out to users.
Bottom line: Fabrik has been really well architected and will eventually be the most powerful and useful data management tool for Joomla, I just don't think it's quite there yet for providing a wide variety of forms and reports for end-users. It is still a very handy tool for more basic reports and for more tech savvy users to maintain data in a database.
Seen this question a bit too late, hope you have managed to solve your issues, but however, my several years experience with Fabrik and a few attempts on PHP frameworks such as Zend, Codeignitor etc, I can tell you Fabrik is the best RAD tool around. Especially now that version 3.x.x which works with latest Joomla 2.5.X is out. Offers so much power that you can have a very powerful system done within one night.
I'm a junior VB.net developer with little application design knowledge. I've been reading a lot of material online regarding different design patterns, frameworks, and methodologies. It's become a bit confusing for me.
Right now I'm trying to decide on what language would be best suited to convert an existing VB6 application (with SQL server backend.) I need to update the UI and add more user functionality and reporting capabilities. Initially I was thinking of using WPF and attempting the MVVM model for this big project. Reports would be generated from SSRS.
A peer suggested using ASP.net and I don't have enough experience to determine what would be better. The senior programmers here are stuck on using VB6 and don't have any input on what to use. They are encouraging me to use the latest technologies.
This application would be for ~20 users in a central location. Ideally I would stick to a Microsoft .net language. Current interface is similar to a datagrid table where the user would click in to see the detail of each record. They would need to have multiple records open at any given time.
I look forward to all the advice I can get.
EDIT 2010/04/22 2:47 PM EST
What is your audience? Internal clients within an intranet
How complex are the interactions you expect to implement? not very... displaying data from SQL server to UI. Allow user updates to said data. Typically just one user modifying a record.
Do you require near real-time data updates? no
How often do you expect to update the application after the first release? twice/year
Do you expect a well-defined set of client platforms? Yes, windows xp environment, potentially upgrading to Win7. Currently in IE.6 moving to IE7 or 8 within a couple of months.
Do users need access from anywhere? No, just from their PC.
What would be wrong about building a simple ASP.Net application in VB.Net using Gridviews for allowing the data access and manipulation? Seems like a simple ADO.Net trial application if you aren't familiar with it in the beginning you will be by the end. CRUD applications are pretty common so it shouldn't be too hard to build it and then refine it as more requirements become apparent.
Sounds like you need to use a web-based solution--this eliminates alot of your potential distribution woes with multiple users. You could use silverlight, but if you are locked into SSRS, this might not be the way to go.