More on GRI 2 - Meta Reports

Although the key aim of GRI 2 is to allow a single web-interface across a collection of hosts to gather reports in a secure manner (customised for each user), the advantage of the JavaScript front-end is that some processing can be handled by the user system and not the server.

This functionality allows GRI 2 to provide "meta reports". Meta reports basically capture raw data from the hosts in question and format the content dynamically as part of the web-interface. This is best demonstrated with by a couple of examples.

Example 1 - Pie Chart
Consider the following data file on a server that is to be presented via GRI 2 to the user:


Object,Number Sold
pies,22
rolls,33
fish,44

This is saved as a report file name and has a type of "csv". Now if it was considered as a standard report then the content when presented to the user would just be as above (opened via a spreadsheet application).

However if this is defined as a meta-report (with a bit of XML) instead it can be presented to the user as:

Example 2 - Line Chart

In a similar manner consider the following report content - again stored as a CSV file:

Total,Used

Date,Total Space,Used Space

17/01/12,100,40

18/01/12,100,45

19/01/12,100,35

20/01/12,100,55

This content is a bit more complex but still GRI 2 allows a simple XML configuration to describe this data in a graphical manner for representation to the user - this time as a line graph:

Summary

Meta-Reports are a key feature of GRI 2. Although still very much in development the prospect of providing end-users with attractive graphical representations of data with out having to generate those images on the end servers is a considered a most useful feature.