[Dev] READ: Big check-in

[Brett Wooldridge]

There's a huge update awaiting you, so here's the skinny.

There is a new bundle:

org.ziptie.server.birt

But many many changes related to the description below ... basically just pull the above bundle, update the world, and clean rebuild.

The old ToolsProvider is slowly becoming the PluginsProvider ... The service name has changed, the fqn of the package and project haven't yet, but it will eventually become "org.ziptie.provider.plugins" rather than "org.ziptie.provider.tools".  This is because BIRT reports are going to be "plugins" that are accessed through the same provider framework.  I didn't like calling Report Plugins "tools", so I think the renaming makes more sense.

So, lots of changes to the old "ToolsProvider".  It now does it's business through an IPluginManager extension-point, where there are now two such extensions providing plugins ... ScriptPluginManager and ReportPluginManager.  Both extensions publish PluginDescriptor's to the PluginsProvider which provides an aggregated (i.e. merged) view of all plugins.  The new PluginDescriptor is the former ToolDescriptor.  Still some more stuff coming, like a "plugin type" attribute (report, script tool, <future type>, ...) on the PluginDescriptors so the UI (and other clients) can possibly do something smarter than showing reports under the tools menu.

I have a BIRT inventory report defined and it runs successfully in the BIRT report designer (under Windows, MacOS not supported).  In the next few days I expect that the ReportPluginManager will be able to scan for report plugins and publish them through the PluginProvider, and that a report job can be scheduled and run through the SchedulerProvider.

I am still debating how to handle output.  Ideally, we would NOT persist the final output format (HTML, PDF, XLS...) but rather BIRT's "intermediate output format", which allows rendering in any of the aforementioned formats without re-running the report (queries).  This is beneficial because I can go back to a report that I ran last month and received has an HTML email and view it again as PDF (without re-executing).  This is especially useful because it allows us to age off data yet still have old reports against that data accessible.  Anyway, doing this requires a bit more work on the client (not much) to do something like add a contributor to the job history view such that when opening a report job allows the selection of format at that instant.  Or maybe "View" and "View as..." where "View" uses some default they've set and "View as..." allows an output selection.  Dunno, just throwing out ideas.

Anyway, that's the news from this side of the planet.  Oh yeah, and I got woken up by an earthquake.

-Brett
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