1 Introduction
DataVision is an Open Source reporting tool similar to Crystal Reports.
Reports can be designed using a drag-and-drop GUI. They may be run, viewed,
and printed from the application or exported as HTML, XML, PDF, Excel, LaTeX2e,
DocBook, or tab- or comma-delimited text files. The output files produced
by LaTeX2e and DocBook can in turn be used to produce PDF, text, HTML,
PostScript, and more.
DataVision is written in Java and runs almost anywhere. It can generate
reports from databases or text data files. Any database with an available
JDBC driver should work: Oracle, PostgreSQL, MySQL, Informix, hsqldb,
Microsoft Access, Progress, and more. Columns read from text files can be
separated by any character.
Report descriptions are stored as XML files. This means you can not only
use the DataVision GUI but you may also edit reports using your favorite
text editor.
DataVision was developed by Jim Menard (jimm@io.com). The project's leader is now Frank
W. Zammetti (fzlists@omnytex.com). The latest version of
DataVision can be found on the DataVision Web page. New
releases are also announced on Freshmeat
and on the DataVision mailing list.
1.1 Recent Changes
Other than updating the version number, there are no changes
-in DataVision between 1.2.0rc2 and the 1.2.0 release.
Here is a summary of the changes in DataVision version 1.2.0rc2
since version 1.2.0.rc1.
- Build the tarball tree under ${tmp} not under ../
Avoids trashing working dir named datavision-
- Merge first 3 lines of intro.html source file, so that
the resulting HTML output validates.
- Updated Derby library (derby.jar) to version 10.3.2.1
- Updated sqlitejdbc driver to version v044.
Also used Pure Java version so the driver will
work on all platforms, not just Windows.
- Set source and target parameters to 1.4 for all
Ant javac tasks.
This should allow resulting compiled bytecode to
be run on all Java runtimes from 1.4 to the present.
- DataVision now requires Java version 1.4 or higher.
Install instructions edited to reflect new dvclasspath
variable rather than classpath.
Here is a summary of the changes in DataVision version 1.2.0rc1
since version 1.1.0.
- Updated COPYING file to reference ASL 2.0
- Include Bundle-Name: and Numble-Version: attributes in
manifest file. Generate the manifest automatically.
- Output DataVision version before the usage message.
- Generate datavision_version.txt automatically.
- Allow Ruby versionNumber.rb to deal with a version
suffix (such as rc1).
- Set version to 1.2.0rc1 ready for release candidate.
- Removed -u look and feel switch from code. Removed
liquidlnf.jar file from lib directory. Reverted default look
and feel to "default". Fixes bug 1923244 Cut and Paste on OS
X does not work.
- Allow column set retrieval in Dervy and SQLite again. (Fixes
issue introduced by r136 use of beforeFirst()).
- Added URLs to download locations for third party
libraries.
- Allow sorted reports to work again.
- Re-enable use of the first column of every table, a fix to
FWZ's fix for SQlite issue enumerating columns.
- Fix for Tracker Issue 1777081 regarding quoting issues. Now
DV uses getIdentifierQuoteString() to decide which quote
character to quote identifiers with.
- Switched to modified .bat and .sh files, courtesy of Jonathan
Marsden.
- Corrected mistakes in a few language files where it said "CSS-based XLS"
instead of the correct "CSS-based HTML" export option and layout engine
specification. Also added that string to one file that was missing it.
- Addressed issue reported by Byron Hurder dealing with SQLite not showing
database columns. Also as part of this, added new sqlite_example.xml
report, and test database (unfortunately the database has to be in the
root directory rather than /examples where I'd prefer it be, just so
that it can be found when DataVision is run... might just need to
specify the path differentlyin the connection string, but nothing I
tried seem to work, so we'll live with the file being somewhere it
would be better off not being).
- Bug #865491 was fixed. Check SVN commit messages on 12/23/2007 for
details (a bunch of files needed to be modified to address this).
Commit message is also a part of the bug ticket for reference.
- Applied patch #1816739 from Marcel Jager who provided Dutch translations.
Thank you Marcel!
- Applied patch #1463294 from David Bennett do address an issue when using
JavaScript as your formula language. Thanks David!
- Added the ObjectSource and related example code. This allows you to run
a report against an ArrayList (where each element is a row) of
ArrayLists (where each element is a column). This works very much like
CharSepSource does, except that you define the data, as well as the
columns, in code. See the example for usage details.
