Business Views

Business views are used as data sources for web reports and library components and are created and managed in JReport Designer. A business view provides report users with a business-oriented view of their data and formulas in a query based data source. It contains database connections and relationships between view elements that are required for creating web reports and library components.

Business views shield report end users from having to understand physical structure, and enable the easy building of complex reports containing multiple components. Business views enable end users to build reports and analyze data based on a set of view elements that they can easily understand. For example, they do not need to worry about where the data source is from (SQL, stored procedure, view), or what the data source is (Oracle, Sybase, XML). Business views also enable IT professionals to maintain control of business data and to ensure its integrity, while presenting end users with an intuitive view of the underlying data structures.

A business view is similar to a report cube except that there is no hierarchical relationship between the data objects in a business view. Report cube dimensions are business view groups and report cube measures are business view aggregations. Create business views when your end users are primarily interested in higher quality presentation style reports and do not need the slice and dice analytic capability. Use report cubes when users are primarily interested in analyzing the data from many dimensions. Both business views and report cubes can be built on top of the same query to support both types of users.

The following detail information is available:

• Business view elements
• Adding a business view
• Editing a business view