Report is one of the key modules in any PLM system. And with the advancement and more emphasis on Analytic and Reporting on Enterprise data, it is going to play key role in future. Till now Report in PLM are static and so called dumb data. They just provide data in term of data extraction and transformation mainly done through style sheet. Now with the advancement of technology and powerful system report is become more complicated and expected to provide answer rather than just dumping the data in nice format. Teamcenter also provide tool for creating both static as well intelligent report. In this blog we will discuss on static report which can be created in Teamcenter through in Build report module. The functionality for complex and Analytic Report is also available in Teamcenter through third party tool.
Reports in Teamcenter: Teamcenter provide to Report Builder Module to create report based on PLM data from Teamcenter. Reports in Teamcenter are based on Query and PLMXML Framework. The basic concept is to get the objects from Teamcenter through query which is basically converted by Teamcenter server in to PLMXML output on top of which xsl style sheet can be applied for layout and Report UI. PLMXML output can be controlled in same way as of creating Transfer mode for exporting/importing object from Teamcenter. I already cover PLMXML in my earlier blog . Reports Builder always create Static Report Report Builder. Reports are basically categorized in three types in Report Builder.
1) Summary Report: These are basically general overall report where report is not in context of specific object. Ex: Change Object Status Reports
2) Item Report: These reports are generated in context of specific object which generally selected by user to create a report. Ex: Signoff Report for CR where CR required to be selected.
3) Custom Report: Teamcenter provide custom Hook for creating Custom report which usually can’t be created through Query or XSL. A custom exe can be written which can create a report when executed by user in Teamcenter session.
Report Builder Modules Component:
Report Builder five major components which basically define the extraction and transformation rule for Reports.
Query: This is search query created in Query Builder module of Teamcenter. Query defined which object required to be extracted under different search criteria. Search Criteria can be either based on some property of Target object or based related object (Ex Item Revision as Target and Dataset as related object). The search criteria either can be exposed to end user or it can be hidden. I covered Query in detail in my Query Builder Blog.
Closure Rule: This component comes from PLMXML module. It defines the extraction rule for the object extracted from Query. The Closure rule defines what other related objects required to be extracted along with target object coming from Query. See my PLMXML blog to know more about Closure Rule.
Property Set: This defines addition attributes required to extract apart from default property for given Object Type by PLMXML Engine. See my PLMXML blog to know more about Property Set.
Report Format: This define XML format for report extracted from Teamcenter. Teamcenter two format traditional PLMXML and TcXML based on new schema available in Teamcenter Unified.
Report Style Sheet: This defined the Layout of the report. This style sheet is XSL files which can convert the XML output from Teamcenter in to different compatible format with proper layout. You can know more about style sheet in W3C site or Wikipedia. Most of the time customization of Report will be limited to XSL creation based on Report Layout requirement.
Custom Component: This is used when you want to create custom reports through some customize code. We required providing path of custom executable and parameter if any required for custom executable.
Most of the generic report can be created from Report Builder without required for any customization. But the limitation is that this report will be always static report and no intelligence can be provided (Filter criteria, If-Else Analysis etc). Also there is no way to fetch data from different source and normalize with Teamcenter for Reporting.
Due to above limitation Teamcenter also provide tightly integrated Teamcenter Reporting and Analytic for advance report from different data source as well for Analytics.