Choosing a Report Data Source

Before you create a report, you need to determine where your report data comes from. The QAD Reporting Framework supports three types of data sources: generic proxy (Progress program), browse, and QAD Financials API. Depending on which type of data source you use, you may need to perform some additional implementation steps.

Generic proxy is a built-in data source provider that calls a Progress program through the QAD .NET UI to get the required data. The Progress program implements all the logic of data queries, calculations, or even database updates when the report is run. This is the most powerful and flexible type of data source in that you can do anything that the Progress language could do to manipulate data in the report. However, it does require you to have Progress programming experience and knowledge of the underlying database schemas in order to write such Progress programs.

Generic data source implementation entails the following general steps:

1 Develop a generic proxy .p program. To develop proxy programs for the QAD Reporting Framework, you are required to be familiar with both Progress programming and QAD ERP database schema.

2 Deploy the generic proxy program into the QAD .NET UI AppServer tier in the following directory under the webapp root location:

3 To improve performance, compile the program into a .r file by running mkdt compile from the <Web App Root>/WEB-INF/pro/com/ directory.

For detailed information on implementing generic proxies, see Implementing a Progress Data Source Program.

The QAD Reporting Framework supports both classic QAD ERP (MFG/PRO) browses and Financials browses as data sources.

In QAD Enterprise Applications, browses display selected data in the form of a table. Column headings are field labels; rows are field values. The field values in a browse come from any table in the QAD Enterprise Applications (MFG/PRO) schema. A browse includes selected values from one table or several joined tables.

You can use an existing browse as the data source for your report by associating the browse ID with the report resource. Then, you can have all the fields in the browse at your disposal to design your report definition.

Classic QAD ERP (MFG/PRO) browses are maintained using Browse Maintenance (36.20.13) and View Maintenance (36.20.18).