Report Builder GUI

[rajgo94]

Hi, I'm Siddhant, a third year undergraduate studying Computer Science at IIT Bombay.
I took part with CiviCRM in GSoC 2014 and my project was Mail Blast UI.
I am familiar with the internal working of CiviCRM and am familiar in the use of AngularJS, Php and MySQL.
I am interested in taking part again and the topic that really excited me was Report Builder GUI.


This is my understanding of the project. Any feedback would be highly valued.
Currently CiviCRM already has a report builder with various templates for each type of report.
Each report template has a fixed set of fields and filters which we can tamper with.
The UI is a little tedious to use, as to set a range one has to go to the appropriate filter,
then choose whether he wants less than, greater than or in between and after that fill in his range.
He has to look scroll through a lot of select2 widgets on the main screen before finding the one, or the
ones which are of concern to him.
This can be changed to some sort of drag and drop UI, where the user himself selects the fields that
are of importance to him, and sets the filters to only those appropriately. This will give the ability
to generate custom reports. Easy layout steps with WYSIWYG design environment will be the goal.
Based on the options he selects, we will send an appropriate query to the database to retrieve the
results and generate the report.
We can offer more statistical options on grouped data other than the average, count and aggregate which
are currently being offered. We can use the average, aggregate and such statistical quantities to
generate a new pivot table, which will make the report easier to read.
Report that we generate can be currently previewed as a PDF or a CSV file so I did not understand the
last part of the problem statement.
I went through Jasper Report, Jorget Workflow and looked at Django Report Builder.

Any clarifications I can get regarding my interpretation of the project would be greatly appreciated.
Also help on any more languages I might need to learn.

Thanking you for your time,
Siddhant Rajagopalan.

[Owen]

Another example of a report builder with a nice GUI is Saiku

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aal8kjTpJ7c

http://www.meteorite.bi/

It's open source and embeddable but requires an XML mondrian schema to map the DB into an OLAP cube.

[xavier]

Quick reminder, not sure if the student(s) interested have done it already for this project, but you have to register and submit the proposal before tomorrow

http://forum.civicrm.org/index.php/topic,36143.0.html

If it's done already, all good, we'll discuss internally and with you and let you learn better our development workflow and tools we use and give you a chance to mingle with the community