Intresting comments on Reporting, SOA & the Role of InfoPath

Ted Neward (Editor-in-Chief of TheServerSide.NET) posted a link on this site to my previous post about Reporting in a SOA World. There are some intresting comments and links posted over there discussing how InfoPath can be (ab)used as a reporting engine:

  • Serve InfoPath Documents Dynamically, Drew Robbins
    “I created a little experiment to serve InfoPath documents dynamically from ASP.NET. Once opened, I wanted the form to already be populated with values from a database rather then having two views (Query and Data Entry). Then, the user could make whatever changes necessary and post back to a web service. The user could also save the document for offline editing and submit to the web service when getting back online later.“
  • Viewing InfoPath forms without InfoPath, Joel Alley (thx to Rolf Tollerud)

Update: Ingo Rammer has posted some comments too.

1 Comment

  • Ingo Rammer is right, that your reporting will be a service, but that is not really the issue is it? In a SOA, your data doesn't necessarily come from a database, or if it does, it's not necessarily your database anyway. You need to mangle all your fragments of data into one homogenous lump, or have at least similar fragments, to be able to use one of the existing database reporting products. Infopath is ok, but it wasn't designed to work with more than a page or two of data, and ultimately it is more geared towards data entry and validation. The other problem you will run into is printing those reports. (in my unfortunately biased opinion)I think that the XSL-FO spec combined with XSLT is a workable solution, but the design tools are still in their infancy.

Comments have been disabled for this content.