Implementing a self service report designer and viewer application
Sarooghi, Mojtaba (2014)
2014
Master's Degree Programme in Information Technology
Tieto- ja sähkötekniikan tiedekunta - Faculty of Computing and Electrical Engineering
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Hyväksymispäivämäärä
2014-12-03
Julkaisun pysyvä osoite on
https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:tty-201412051598
https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:tty-201412051598
Tiivistelmä
Supporting users in dealing with huge amount of raw data and getting value out of data is one of the interesting and evolving topics in the IT world from both technical and usability points of view. The current extensive growth in the amount of data and significant consideration of data analysis in business decision making have forced companies to invest more on data management solutions and tools with innovative and user centered approaches.
This thesis work implements a self-service data reporting tool helping ordinary users to visualize, browse and analyze their data. This product allows report designer users to analyze and visualize their data and also design intractable dynamic reports for users who just want to see and play with ready reports. As a result, this product is consisted of two parts, one report designer and one report viewer application.
In the first part of this text some technical backgrounds considering report designer applications are mentioned, then the details of the development phase specific to the product under development and consisting of its design and implementation details are discussed and finally some evaluations of the product and design decisions are summarized.
Choosing development environment was a critical decision. The practical problems of selecting HTML/JavaScript as the main development technology is reported by development team. JavaScript codebase is hard to manage, there is not enough tooling support for JavaScript programming which reduces the speed of development, moreover HTML based pages which are hosted inside a web browser were not flexible enough to support users in interacting with UI (in report designer application),or in a better way, it is discussed that supporting users with a good experience in UI interactions for report designer application was a complicated task because of choosing HTML as UI technology. Furthermore, in the designed user’s workflow model it was decided to empower users by providing them with a rich user control and freedom as the main feature of the application, though at the end, this design decision caused some complexities and lack of efficiency in the usability of the product.
This thesis work implements a self-service data reporting tool helping ordinary users to visualize, browse and analyze their data. This product allows report designer users to analyze and visualize their data and also design intractable dynamic reports for users who just want to see and play with ready reports. As a result, this product is consisted of two parts, one report designer and one report viewer application.
In the first part of this text some technical backgrounds considering report designer applications are mentioned, then the details of the development phase specific to the product under development and consisting of its design and implementation details are discussed and finally some evaluations of the product and design decisions are summarized.
Choosing development environment was a critical decision. The practical problems of selecting HTML/JavaScript as the main development technology is reported by development team. JavaScript codebase is hard to manage, there is not enough tooling support for JavaScript programming which reduces the speed of development, moreover HTML based pages which are hosted inside a web browser were not flexible enough to support users in interacting with UI (in report designer application),or in a better way, it is discussed that supporting users with a good experience in UI interactions for report designer application was a complicated task because of choosing HTML as UI technology. Furthermore, in the designed user’s workflow model it was decided to empower users by providing them with a rich user control and freedom as the main feature of the application, though at the end, this design decision caused some complexities and lack of efficiency in the usability of the product.