Introduction

Problem Statement

Windchill provides advanced search and reporting capabilities using the Report Builder utility. This utility OOTB allows the user to create “saved searches” which are reusable.

These reports use a XML language to specify queries and parameters to queries. The Report Builder utility features a graphical UI to create reports.

_images/report-manager.jpg

Unfortunately, these reports are persistent-only, and can’t used by-name. Thus, when developing web applications which need reports, the appropriate report needs to be manually created or imported to Windchill, and a reference to the report must be stored in the web application.

Additionally, there’s no way to specify a report XML w/o creating a persistent report object. This is unfortunate, as ad-hoc reporting is very much limited by this fact.

Goal

The goal of the nexiles|gateway report service is to:

  • provide easy access to existing reports: - list reports, filter by name, number - execute reports, returning XML results

  • execute a ad-hoc report query by HTTP POST-ing a report XML

    This allows users to build web applications which assemble their own report XMLs by e.g. dynamically adding criteria based on user selection w/o having to persistently store reports.

Repository, Issue Tracker

repository
git@github.com:nexiles/nexiles.gateway.reportservice.git
issue tracker
https://github.com/nexiles/nexiles.gateway.reportservice/issues