Joe Marini

As XML has grown more prevalent as a data delivery mechanism, so too has the need to use it for presentation in a wide variety of reporting formats. XML is useful for more than just the delivery of information, however. It can be used to help solve a wide range of problems encountered when designing a business data reporting solution, from specifying the layout of the reports themselves to controlling where the data used in the report comes from. At Panscopic, we develop an enterprise-class data reporting and analytics product that consists of two main elements: the Panscopic Scope Server, which takes report definition files and executes them to produce finished output, and the Scope Creation Suite, a set of client-side authoring tools that create the report definitions that the server executes (reports are called "Scopes" in Panscopic's parlance). Some of the challe... (more)