SQL Power Software Forum

I have been using wabit 0.9.7 for a few days now to produce some data quality reports, and so far so good, its a great product to generate reports quickly.... although I do have a few suggestions/possible bug?

Text formatting doesn't seem to be preserved in

1) the SQL editor window
I am writing quite a few of my own queries for the reports and like to format my SQL nicely and comment it so I remember what on earth it is for/returning. However the formatting is never preserved, if i restart wabit and reopen my query its all on one line.

2) the content boxes in the report designer
they don't wrap text, and if you put in carriage returns they are not preserved, for example in the footer I have one box, on first line put the page number, then do a carriage return, on 2nd line then put the 'generated' variable... when I re-open the report after restarting wabit that formating is not preserved, so my reports looks a mess and I have to re-format the boxes.

Workspace.. it would be great if there was a way to organise queries & reports in the workspace. Eg, being able to create folders to group reports/queries, or move reports & queries up and down in the workspace so that I can structure my workspace a bit better as the number of reports and queries is getting large already.

Thanks

Hi irnbru,

We currently have this bug on our short list for the end of this month. You can track this issue from bug 2078.

Workspace.. it would be great if there was a way to organise queries & reports in the workspace. Eg, being able to create folders to group reports/queries, or move reports & queries up and down in the workspace so that I can structure my workspace a bit better as the number of reports and queries is getting large already.

I think this is a really neat idea and one that we haven't considered yet. At current we are changing some of the look to Wabit, one of the changes is adding folders to group queries, data sources, and reports. If we allowed users to create additional folders so they could group Wabit objects that were related it could help with organizing. I have added this as bug 2081.

Thanks again for the feedback,

Thomas

Hi Thomas

Thanks for your prompt replies to my posts so far, I look forward to following wabit's and power architects development paths.

As I use both of them more over the next few weeks to do my data quality analysis work, I'll maybe post some more suggestions - your positive response to suggestions on the forums is great

Hi thomas

As the number of reports and queries I have in Wabbit has doubled today I have another suggestion which is kind of related to the workspace but probably more related to metadata, so not sure how big a change/feature request his would be however here goes, hope it makes sense.

For each query/report (maybe even DB connection) it would be great to have some additional fields to populate for the 'object' in question. For example

Purpose

Description

Author

Status (draft, test, prod)

Owner (e.g who the report is distributed too)

My idea for this came from using an open source data profiling tool called Talend Open Profiler, I found these types of metadata fields extermely useful. They are great for keeping track of the purposes of my data profiling etc

At the moment I am using wabbit for data quality analysis some of my queries are quite complex. I have a shocking memory so it would be great to record purpose /description for the queries and reports so that when I come to look at the stuff i did a few days ago i dont' have to read the SQL to try and figure out what I was thinking back then

I saw in another post there was mention of hoping to extend wabbit to allow viewing of reports on a web server (that would be fab by the way), this kind of metadata and possibly more tagging/categorizing functionality combined with viewing reports on a WS would really help with finding/understaing reports by people who didn't necessarily write the actually reports.

Keep up the good work guys

Hi Irnbru,

Thanks for the suggestions! I've added an enhancement request in our bug tracker under bug 2088.

I really like the description field idea. I would extend this by adding the description as a tooltip when you hover over objects in the tree. This way you can quickly scan for what you are looking for and if several names appear similar you can just check their description without moving away from what you're currently looking at.

The author and owner fields will be needed when we add security to the server component of Wabit. I think these make a bit more sense on the server than a local workspace. When the server is complete users will be able to retrieve and upload workspaces from the server to allow easy collaboration. The idea of an author of each part of a workspace will be important for permissions. If you are just working with local files and storing them in a source control system or just sharing them with other people being able to remember where parts of your workspace would be useful so we could make them editable for a local workspace.

The status options would be very helpful for noting what parts of Wabit are used in reports that were already sent versus what's currently being changed frequently as it's in development. I think visual feedback like a border or background change of the elements in the tree would be helpful. This way all objects that are in production have a green border or background while objects in development have a black and yellow background.

Thomas

hi again Thomas.. and thanks again for a super speedy reply to my post.

I like the idea of a short desription field that can be a tool tip.. thats a fab idea, and then maybe a longer description for complex reports, futher background info etc that can be viewed elsewhere in a separate window or something &/or in the webserver side.

I also really like the idea of combining the status field with colour coding, that would be really useful.

I agree if you are implementing the concept of author & owner etc in the server functionality then it might be overkill in the local workspace.

let me know if you need any help testing