Continuing the work on storing reports information in a database

• Since reports need owners I spent a little time making a User object and a service for handling users including a log-in screen with password changing, it’s pretty much ready for use minus moving it to some shared server project and mavenizing any required imports
• Now able to create and stored reports from Flex to MySQL (or pretty much any database) from code on the Flex side, there’s currently no GUI support for creating reports

The basic format I have for storing reports is:

• A Report object has an id, an owner (User), an xml string storing layout information, and a collections of ReportSections.  The xml layout simply defines how the sections are laid out and relative to each other and any text headers, more could be added later.
• A ReportSection has an id, an owner (possibly different from the Report owner), a type string, and a data string, as well as references to any report which currently contains it.  The idea is a ReportSection can be almost anything (some text, a data table, a chart, an images, etc.), so we’ll store a string defining it that the UI can use to figure out what to display.  It’s data string may be some html text, a url for an image, or some xml data for a table.
• Finally, Comments have also been added to the database.  Currently a Comment has an id, a date created, an owner, and text.  The plan is to have Comments referenced from what they are commenting on.  So a user may comment on an image in a report; that ReportSection would have references to the comments made on it and could be loaded by id.

Next on the todo list:

• Get a report loaded from the display and displayed in the framework, currently I’ve only looked at report information in the Flex debugger
• Add support for tables, currently only text sections are being stored
• Add support for images
• Get the SCT report in to the database
• Test this thing out by putting the FGM website in it

That should keep me busy for awhile