Reporting in Alfresco

[mabayona]

I´m about to implement a reporting application/module in Alfresco and I´m not yet sure how to best do it. I have to report about the status of several workflows (which are mapped to a specific space/folder structure to allow for access using CIFS to the result of each state in the workflow  -i.e. the documents produced in each state of the workflow are stored in a different folder/space-).

Options are:

1) Using the custom search capabilities to produce results about the different active workflows and report them using a template

2) Using an external tool (e.g. Jasper Reports) to produce the results (unfortunatelly the Forge project "Enterprise Report Services" has not yet produced a version compatible with v2.1 nor has delivered source code that can be modified to run with v2.1)

3) Using the WCM functionality

4) Using custom behaviors

5) Using the new JavaScript API (only available in yet-to-come v2.2?)

¿what do you think?

[fogo]

"(unfortunatelly the Forge project "Enterprise Report Services" has not yet produced a version compatible with v2.1 nor has delivered source code that can be modified to run with v2.1) "

You can use the ant script in the latest version to generate an amp file.

You can then use the Module Management tool to integrate the module with 2.1.

I think it works with 2.1

[mabayona]

Reading the forums of "Enterprise Report Services":

"The sample reports appear to be reporting against external (non-alfresco) databases. I have a need to write reports on Alfresco document "meta data". Can I do that?
…..

It is possible to consume alfresco relational database with BIRT. One road is using the relational model. But this will be a very difficult task for most of the reports you are designing.

So, you will probably want a cleaner representation for your alfresco reports. We need an abstraction layer. Using ODA you can consume Alfresco Objects in your reports. For this you have to implement a ODA driver. This is one of the things we are considering. There are problems with this approach since in the designer you may not be able to design your reports."

The point here is to report using data directly from Alfresco and not from external databases. There is such an "abstraction layer" in Alfresco?.

My question is: ¿what is the best way to obtain data from Alfresco to include it in the reports?. Do we need some "internal reporting layer API" to be included in Alfresco to report about:

- Workflows & workflow history
- Metadata & metadata history
- Content & content history

is there such an integrated report services API in Alfresco? is it planned for a future release??

[shahid]

Newbie to Alfresco so apologies if this is a stupid question.


I too would have a particular need to be able to report on the "status" of documents within the Alfresco repository (e.g. "published", "under review", dates for review etc).

Is this something which can be achieved with the current setup? Would I be able to run queries against the DB using Crystal or similar BI software to determine the "status" of the documents in the repository?

[kevinr]

You can run queries against attributes of nodes using our Lucene integration. You can display the results of those queries using FreeMarker templates etc.
http://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/Template_Guide
http://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/Search

Thanks,

Kevin