Making a Tabular Report Using the Table Wizard

When I start making a tabular report, I select the Table Wizard. Now the wizard takes me through a step-by-step process and handholds me and walks me through different steps. A user with permissions can even set up batch jobs. He can schedule tasks, and say, run this report everyday at 6 o’clock in the morning and email it out to my boss. Here’s where you set a time condition when you want to run this, daily, weekly, monthly, hourly and action.

What do you want to run? I want to run this report, and I choose the report we just created. I would like a notification was it successful, did it fail? I would like to deliver to these as emails. Each of these tasks can also be run on demand. So this would be the user interface.

To install the product, we give you a server module, so you can launch the BI application. We also give you a Desktop Developer tool. The Desktop Developer tool is called Style Studio. Style Studio has a lot of functions. One of the main functions is data modeling. So before you create any report at dashboard, you first have to hook into your databases and extract data from your different data sources.

First I create a data source. A data source could be your relational database, Web service, flat file or SAP connector, almost anything. You could connect to an analysis engine. You can connect to your OLAP cubes. Once I created my data source which is basically the information I need to connect to my database, how do I extract my data? I can create one or more predefined queries, one or more predefined SQL queries, but those queries are restrictive. It's a fixed result set, but I want to be more flexible, so I create data models.

The data model consists of two parts. It’s a mapping. The data model is not a query. It consists of a physical view and a logical model. The physical view is my actual schema or a subset of my schema. I did a drag and drop of my tables. It doesn’t have to be the whole schema. I normally start up with a fact table or a transaction table and build it around it. Once I have my physical view, I can build my logical model. So I map my physical world to my business world.

In my logical model I create one or more entities. And I simply drag & drop from my tables into my entity. Even though my data may be normalized in my database, it’s spread across many different tables. If it falls under one business umbrella, I can represent it in a way which makes more business sense. I can even rename my fields to make them more useful.

And this is what I would expose to my developer as my business users. They just drag and drop from this model. Based on the physical mapping, InetSoft builds a query for them.

In my data source I can also create what is call a Virtual Private Model. Remember we were talking about dynamic data filtering? Two users can view the same dashboard, the same report and they automatically have their data filtered based on their privileges or their roles. A VPM is basically a dynamic query filter. It contains different components like Lookup. This is the first line of defense. Should I apply this or not? In the VPM, I save the knowledge of the user, his roles, his groups, parameters – tables, the columns. I can embed my own little business rules, and here you have a very simple rule.

“We evaluated many reporting vendors and were most impressed at the speed with which the proof of concept could be developed. We found InetSoft to be the best option to meet our business requirements and integrate with our own technology.” - John White, Senior Director, Information Technology at Livingston International

If the user is Eric, go ahead and filter the data for all of the users. They can see everything. What do I filter? I automatically bring in the sales employees table and filter it by the first name, so Eric only sees sales made by himself. Other employees, other sales reps see everyone’s data. And you can see the connection. Notice this report. When I login as Robert, notice how Robert sees data for all the sales reps, but if I log out and I log in as Eric, Eric only sees data, only sees sales made by himself.

So you see all this data automatically filtered out. It’s the same dashboard. Even if he tries to do his own querying, create his own dashboard, he will still filter out all his data, so any query which is close to the database will be intercepted and filtered out.

Question: The portal looks very good. It will do exactly what we are looking for, and obviously I can see potential for other areas as well. The opportunity that I mentioned needs the dashboards and the reports. It’s a very impressive application. It's very good. Thank you.