Ability to expose serveral objects for export or reporting?

[gmarkow]

We are relatively new to using Mega. One of the challenges we are encountering is that of reporting.

We are well versed in the plethora of reporting technologies available in the industry and experts in the SQL variants.

We ask for help in how we can produce a relatively simple report in Mega, but seem unable to determine how.

We would like to produce an exportable columnar view which would include:

1. Several columns from the Application object
2. Several columns from the Person and Person Assignment objects which are associated with the application object and their roles
3. All of the columns from the technology object Software Technology where the technology is related to the Application Object

In essence the available output would be a product of Application * Person * Software Technology.

We spent several hours researching and trying to do this in ERQL. We were unable to determine how to return several related objects.

1. Can this be done using ERQL?
2. If not, can anyone provide guidance or a solution as to how we might accomplish the above?

Thanks!

[jhorber]

Hello gmarkow

Is it possible to do the same with the Mega implementation of ERQL?

--> not really. ERQL is not SQL. It is a hierarchially oriented query language

By design the execution of an ERQL query returns a flat list of objects of a target MetaClass

To get a tree style report, you have to us use more advanced tool such as

• RTF/HTML descriptor
• API script

You also have to know well the metamodel you are browsing

[gmarkow]

Thank you both for your suggestion.  We will need to look into the RTF method.

Is it possible to do the same with the Mega implementation of ERQL?

For example (as in SQL):

select

 application .[application name]

,people .[person name]

,technology .[technology name]

from application application

join pjoiner pjoiner on (pjoiner .aid = application .aid)

join people people on (people .pid = pjoiner.pid)

join tjoiner tjoiner on (tjoiner.aid = application.aid)

join technology technology on (technology.tid = tjoiner.tid)

in essence the joins process a hierarchical view of the data.  Very standard and very simple in any RDB.

Thanks.

[lmazurie]

Hi,

My experience about it and the most efficient way is to ... define a .rtf descriptor (Documentation module required).

You have the great opportunity to implement a tree-oriented extraction including "embedded" ERQL queries

You can generate a formated .csv text file 

With this way you are trully free to build a template for complex extraction ...

 Regards,

[hsoegaard]

Hi,

If you need to export the report, I assume you need to export to Excel, then you could use the Excel export functionality directly to extract all the data you need.