Reporting

Introduction

The goal of this effort is to define a common set of features that RESTful services should implement to enable reporting. Reporting is an important capability across the entire software development lifecycle. For example, reporting is very important in software project management both for communications and for performance management. We are addressing the topic as a common function across all lifecycle domains.

REST services defined on software development tool repositories, e.g. for Change Management, Quality Management, etc., provide a natural source of data for reports. The data may be used in the following contexts:

• operational reporting - e.g. generate tabular or graphical business reports showing the latest data, on demand
• documentation - e.g. generate complex documents showing tracibility of requirements to architectural elements and test cases
• analytics - e.g. batch load bulk data nightly to populate a data warehouse for business intelligence reporting

In order to efficiently support the above uses of data, REST services should support certain features. The scope of this workgroup includes specifying the following feaures, which will be elaborated in the use cases specification:

• metadata - report design and data warehousing tools need to know the shape of the data
• paging - very large results should be split into pages
• inlining - linked data should be inlined in the response to reduce the number of requests
• selecting - only a selected subset of attributes should be returned
• filtering - the server should filter the result based on specified criteria to reduce the result size
• deltas- the server should only return data that has been modified since a specified date
• navigation - the data should contain links to related data

Further discussion of goal and scope in the kickoff meeting.

Scope

Scoping assumption:

1. The Reporting 1.0 specification must be sufficient to support the Reporting 1.0 use cases.
2. The Reporting 1.0 specification should support domain specification 2.0. There is a concern on timing as the other domain specification is being developed.
3. Domain resources are assumed to be stable. i.e. domain resource evolution (changes) over time will be addressed by future release of Reporting. Note: If domain resource 2.0 specification supports versioning, then Reporting will need to look at supporting it.

Status

This workgroup is in the start-up phase. The kickoff meeting is schedule on Oct 2, 2009. See Reporting Meetings for details.

To seed this effort, IBM is attaching Reportable_Rest_Services_Interfaces-OSLC_Submission.pdf developed for use Rational Insight and other products. This document is intended to serve as input for discussion and to inform the workgroup.

Approach

The specifications will be developed by establishing use cases and then defining the Reportable REST Service Specifications to support them. This workgroup will take a slightly unique approach compared to other workgroups. We'll be collaborating closely with the other workgroups to ensure that the domain specifications include reportable features and will look to the domain workgroups to drive service provider implementations that support reporting. This workgroup will encourage and track those implementations, as well as reporting solutions that consume the domain services.

Relationship with OSLC Core Specification

• The Reporting WG will input requirements based on its ReportingUseCases to the Core Specification WG.
• The Reporting WG will review Core Specification related to Reporting topics to ensure they meet Reporting requirements.
• Core Specification will be discussed and defined by the Core Specification WG. Reporting specification will make references to them as appropriate.
• The following table summarizes the Reporting topics that are driven from the ReportingUseCases and their relationship with OSLC Core Specification.

Working Documents

Prior Work

• Insight/RPE Reportable REST Specification - current spec. defined for working with current version of Insight/RPE. This could be a good source of use cases and requirements. However, we need to be vigilant not too much influence by this spec. in choosing technologies and defining interfaces.
• OSLC-CM 1.0 Specification has many features that are somehow related to Reporting. This could be a good source to factor those out as part of the OSLC Reportable Specification and generalize for cross domain purpose.

Topics for Future Consideration

1. New use case based on RSx.
2. Sample data annotation in Resource Shape description.

Milestones

Overall Milestones

Participants

TackTong (lead)
ArthurRyman
BenjaminWilliams
DragosCojocari
MikKersten
ScottBosworth
SebRose
SteveAbrams
JamesMoody
VishyRamaswamy
XiangDongHu
SteveSpeicher

ScottFairbrother

JimDaly?

StevePitschke

JoanTouzet

PaulMcMahan

PaulTasillo?

EinarKarlsen

Feedback

Specification comments and issues

Mailing List

Reporting Mailing List

General Open Services