Interactive Reports part 1

The reports in sqldev 1.1 change a lot. Among the changes are different types of reports, master details , context menus and drill downs. Alot of these features can be created/changed by the Create Report dialog but a number of them can not. I'll try and explain how to do things not in the dialog in the next few blogs working up to a interactive report which will show how to add these to your own reports.

In this post I'll talk about about the basic changes to the xml. In 1.0, the report looked like this:

<report type="report" enable="true">
  <name><![CDATA[Good Stuff Report]]></name>
  <description><![CDATA[my great report]]></description>
  <tooltip><![CDATA[This is the best report ever]]></tooltip>
    <query >
       <sql><![CDATA[select ......]]></sql>
  </query>
</report>

If you had some reports in 1.0 and have since start 1.1, you can look at the file in $HOME/.sqldeveloper/UserReports.xml and see the file was migrated. This same report in 1.1 will look like:

<display id="" type="" style="Table" enable="true">
  <name><![CDATA[Good Stuff Report]]></name>
  <description><![CDATA[my great report]]></description>
  <tooltip><![CDATA[This is the best report ever]]></tooltip>
  <query>
    <sql><![CDATA[select dummy from dual]]></sql>
  </query>
</display>

While this mostly looks the same, the noticeable addition is the id, type, style attributes. The id attribute is what shows up in the LOV of the Advanced Tab of the dialog when the Add Report is pressed. The type attribute isn't used in this example yet. The style is what kind of report it is and the default styles are

• Table - normal grid of data
• Code - A big text field of the data concatenated together
• Chart - renders a chart from the data
• Script - runs the contents of the sql tag as a sql script
• plsql-dbms_output - This will grab the dbms_output from the plsql and render it as html
• More later on how to create your own

To make a master detail report all that's needed is to add another display tag inside the existing one. The binds for the child will be looked up into the row which is selected in the parent.

<display id="" type="" style="Table" enable="true">
  <name><![CDATA[Good Stuff Report]]></name>
  <description><![CDATA[my great report]]></description>
  <tooltip><![CDATA[This is the best report ever]]></tooltip>
  <query>
    <sql><![CDATA[select dummy from dual]]></sql>
  </query>

  <!-- child -->
  <display id="" type="" style="Table" enable="true">
    <name><![CDATA[Details of stuff ]]></name>
    <description><![CDATA[my details ]]></description>
    <tooltip><![CDATA[This is very interesting stuff]]></tooltip>
    <query>
      <sql><![CDATA[select :DUMMY parent_data from dual]]></sql>
    </query>
  </display>
</display>

Now I've shown nothing more than what the Report dialog can do to create a master/detail report. The first thing you can do which is not in the dialog is take these display tags and nest them as deep as you'd like. Such as this which adds a grandchild to this example:

<display id="" type="" style="Table" enable="true">
  <name><![CDATA[Good Stuff Report]]></name>
  <description><![CDATA[my great report]]></description>
  <tooltip><![CDATA[This is the best report ever]]></tooltip>
  <query>
    <sql><![CDATA[select dummy from dual]]></sql>
  </query>

    <!--  child -->
    <display id="" type="" style="Table" enable="true">
       <name><![CDATA[Details of stuff ]]></name>
       <description><![CDATA[my details ]]></description>
       <tooltip><![CDATA[This is very interesting stuff]]></tooltip>
       <query>
         <sql><![CDATA[select :DUMMY parent_data from dual]]></sql>
       </query>
      
        <!-- grandchild -->
        <display id="" type="" style="Table" enable="true">
           <name><![CDATA[Details of stuff ]]></name>
           <description><![CDATA[my details ]]></description>
           <tooltip><![CDATA[This is very interesting stuff]]></tooltip>
           <query>
              <sql><![CDATA[select :PARENT_DATA parent_data from dual]]></sql>
           </query>
        </display>
    </display>
</display>

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Add the ability to make a connection read only

To show how simple it is to add functionality to the context menus in sqldeveloper without writing any java like I posted before about. I'll take a case which was on the forums today about how to make a connection read only. As most people probably know there's a set transaction read only; command which can be issued which prevents the session from issuing updates. To make it easy to toggle this in sqldeveloper, here's what I did:

The format of the xml is the same as the post before. Save this xml to a file:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<items xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
xsi:noNamespaceSchemaLocation="dialogs.xsd">
   <item type="CONNECTION" reload="true">      
     <title>Set RO</title>     
     <prompt type="confirm">
        <label>Confirm Setting Connection to Read Only.</label>
     </prompt>
     <sql>
        <![CDATA[begin dbms_transaction.read_only; end;]]>
     </sql><help>Issues dbms_transaction.read_only; </help>      
     <confirmation>
     ><title>Confirmation</title>
        <prompt>Success</prompt>
     </confirmation>
   </item>
   <item type="CONNECTION" reload="true">
     <title>Set RW</title>
     <prompt type="confirm">
        <label>Confirm Setting Connection to Read Write.</label>
     </prompt>
     <sql>
       <![CDATA[begin dbms_transaction.read_write; end;]]>
     </sql>
     <help>Issues dbms_transaction.read_write; </help>
     <confirmation>
       <title>Confirmation</title>
       <prompt>Success</prompt>
     </confirmation>
  </item>
</items>

Now go into the Preferences->User Defined Extensions. Prior to 1.1, this would have needed some java coding but now it's very easy to load this xml file. While this shows the file on the file system, it could just as easily use referenced a URL such as http://myhost.mycompany.com/some/path/to/somewhere/ro.xml

Now when after I restart the tool, I'll see the menu option and here's what happens when I try to update the data in a table:


Then If I want to edit again, I choose the other menu which sets things back to read write.