Towards A Design for An Extendable Reporting Interface

This paper proposes a design of an extendable reporting interface. The design of this interface is focused on how the data can be retrieved from a data processing software and how reports are generated to be consumed by another system. The reporting interface should be independent from its client software and from the report format that has to be produced. Therefore, there is a need for a very general data structure to handle various type of incoming data. We decided to use XML as a structure to create a report which later is consumed by another system. However, not all systems are able to process XML as an input. Therefore, the reporting interface should have the capability to produce several output formats. In addition, live reporting should also be supported to allow the user to retrieve information as soon as possible while the final report is being generated.