What is software requirement specification for automatic report generation process?

Answer 1

There are too many ways to answer so let's start with assumptions on your goals and answer as follows:

You'll need at least a method of storing the portions of the future report. We do this as "bits." Then you'll need to store many other pieces of the generation protocol, like what triggers any piece being included? For parts that are generated on the fly (without stored text) whence do they come (i.e. weather might be collected from a website, temperature might be measured from your digital thermometer connected to your PC, a user's name might be requested at the moment of report generation, today's date is a system variable and the current conversion rate of $Dollars to ¥Yen may be pulled down from Bloomberg or some Bulletin board service.

This means the main software requirement would be a database. We've generated documents from Access, Outlook, Word using Excel for the data, and Oracle. Since each of these allows a coding and application capability, they could be used as stand alone "software" specifications and no other piece would be required. In practice however, you will want more sophisticated tools.

After storage (we also recommend MySQL, which is now owned by Sun, and which is a robust back end) the data based on a list or event handling is streamed into a report. What format would you like that in? Different formats offer benefits and weaknesses. The report is generated and then we'd recommend creating from whatever initial format is preferred, or AS an initial format, moving it to a secure *PDF. This can be effected in a variety of ways, from Adobe or third party pdf generators. The portable document format (pdf) is definitely the most versatile, compact (while being robust) and compatible format for a final digital document. If printed, Adobe virtually guarantees that it will look on paper as it does on the screen, and yet the beautiful file is no larger than necessary.

Other final document considerations should also be taken - i.e. if it will be viewed on a pda or phone, you may consider xml or some other web based format which can be style sheeted to reflow for the particular viewing screen. This is a less versatile but more adaptable format.

Summarizing you'll need:

* A storage application and file - Database, i.e. Access; MySQL * A generation application - VBA in Access; MySQL Stored procedures, etc. * A document preperation platform - handle it as text in Access or MySQL; or move to Word or Quark or another app for complex features, i.e. column based text flow or table of contents.

* An application for conversion from this preparation stage to a PDF or web-based (XML, HTML) final document or eBook.