Tuesday, September 21, 2010

Enesys RS Data Extension

This product looks like a leap in using SSRS with SharePoint lists as a data source

Enesys RS Data Extension

As pointed out in Creating Reports From SharePoint Lists Using SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) , it is pretty much impossible to directly query from more than one list in SSRS using the web services as a data source. Even with a single list, doing so requires some fine-tuning of the XML request, looking up a list and view guid, and the whatnot. At this point, nothing I would be prepared to hand off to the typical report analyst role.

Looks like the Enesys product makes it pretty clear to pull from a SharePoint list by name, and some features to pull from multiple lists in a query of some sort...

Also, looking at the Enesys IS data extension asserts to be able to pull from SharePoint lists directly, I've only, again, used the web services in SharePoint to pull from a single list as XML - there is a lot of hand-coding in the process.

Will be grabbing an evaluation copy soon and see how it works!

UML stencils for Visio

Ran across UML stencils for Visio, which appear to be an open source download.

UML, is a codified way for analysts to present and document their work, and even Microsoft Visio Professional's UML stencils don’t truly conform to latest version of UML, but these stencils are closer…

Visio Templates for UML 2.0

Saturday, September 4, 2010

Mashup Development

Reading the ProgrammableWeb and other sites, recently, was feeling behind on the technology of creating mashups.

Decided to at least start a very basic one, to remind myself of the steps, and start hooking into a more modern API. Started with... Programmable Web's 'How to make your own mashup' article, and browsed through the APIs. I had did maps years ago with Virtual Earth and Google Maps, and while my skills are completely up to the latest mapping, creating yet another mapping mashup didn't enthrall me, and I couldn't come up with any compelling ideas.

So, settled on using LinkedIn's API (which has a bad link as of this writing, but found the correct link to LinkedIn's API site) and started up using the Company Insider Widget.

Had to remind myself some of the basic layout of JavaScript, The Linked In api thus far has been simple to use and their documentation clear.

The View Source bookmarklet and/or IE 8 Developer Tools came in handy, for those unfamiliar, the 'View Source' in the web browser proper shows the source of the page upon load from a web server. When dynamic script modifies the page, another tool is needed to show the source of the page as 'currently' rendered.

So my work in progress project is the Real World IS Company Viewer allowing some ways to display various company information. Definitely just a starting point, kind of stumbled upon a feature in the API that adds information about a company each time a certain API is called, rather than replacing the existing information. With that, I'm envisioning expanding the interface to build up a list of companies to 'watch'