[Dev] Reports as Tools

[Leo Bayer]

Brett,

I would like it for reports to be tools as far as the client is 
concerned.  This includes the metadata, scheduling, and output.  So to 
run a report I would schedule a tools job (using the same job type as a 
script tool).  If reports are just tools then the output can be shared.  
For instance an arbitrary tool can have 'html' as the output type and 
running it would make available the HTML.  In the report case it just 
happens that BIRT is what generated the output.  As far as the UI is 
concerned what makes it a Report as opposed to something else is that it 
is in the "Report" group (or conceivably instead of groups, just use the 
tool type for the group).

Doing this would presumably mean that there is only one job on the 
server for running any type of tool.  A client only needs to know how to 
manage a tool and how to show output for a tool.  To me this seems like 
a nice factorization so there are fewer pieces.  Also it means that a 
report could be written in perl if someone really wanted to.  And our 
traditional tools could also be written in BIRT if they wanted to (by 
having the report's output type being our traditional CSV).

This stream of conciousness brought to you by
 - Leo