Download JRS New and Noteworthy Sprint 3

Jazz Reporting Service - New and Noteworthy
The Jazz Reporting Service is a new capability in the Jazz family of products to assist with
gathering knowledge and reporting on an enterprise's software life cycle data. It can create
consolidated reports on data in RTC, RQM, RM and others and show how the data links
together. It also has the power to display data together that reside in different project areas.
Then the data can be displayed as a table or a chart and displayed in a common dashboard.
This powerful reporting capability is married with a simple and elegant user interface that is
easy to use and maintain. Integrating the JRS with a CLM installation is a straightforward
process and does not interfere with any existing topology.
To navigate to the Jazz Reporting Service, open the following URL in your browser:
https://<server url>:<port>/rs
The port used in an RRDI installation is typically 12433.
Highlights of the new Jazz reporting service:
Query Builder
The Query Builder is a graphical editor that allows you to construct queries from any
supported data source. You can pick one or more resource types from any of the supported
CLM applications (RTC, RQM, RM) connected by a relationship and then filter the results by
their attributes. This is generated in a domain specific query (SQL or SPARQL) that can be
run against the data source to retrieve the query results. No knowledge of the particular
query language is assumed and the query can be re-edited in its graphical form for
subsequent changes. If more advanced query functionality is required (not supported by the
builder), you can copy the generated query source into a manual editor for additional
changes.
Query and Report Management Capabilities
Now you can organize and search for your queries and reports in different convenient ways.
You can group the resources by type (Query / Report), by visibility (Public or Private) and also
by tag. Individual queries or reports can be tagged with key phrases that let them be viewed
or searched in context to the tag. There is also an advanced filtering capability that allows
filtering by type, visibility and also by tag. This will exclude anything that does not meet the
filtering criteria. Finally, there is also a filter by text functionality that will further filter the
browser list by key words typed into the filter input box.
SQL and Data warehouse Integration
Previously the Jazz Reporting Service only supported data sources that could run SPARQL
queries. In order for the JRS to be as flexible as possible, we now additionally support data
sources that run SQL (relational databases). Specifically we focused on the data warehouse
that is used currently in the CLM family of products for reporting with other tools in IBM
Rational Reporting solution. This lets us harness the full set of robust data that is
synchronized into the data warehouse. With the addition of the DCC (Data Collection
Component), the synchronization of application data into the repository is much faster then in
the past. This integration with SQL based queries is also part of the Query Builder support, so
for most people it is not necessary to understand SQL in order to construct queries.
Setup Wizard for Data source and Ready to use Reports
In order to make the setup of the JRS as easy as possible, we have a wizard style interface
that can quickly set up any detected data sources such as the LQE (Lifecycle Query Engine)
or the data warehouse. You will need the data warehouse password in order to complete this
phase of the setup. Once the data sources are set up, with the simple click of a button a set
of “Ready to use Reports” can be imported and run right away. These “Ready to use Reports”
represent a set of default queries and reports that help demonstrate how lifecycle queries can
be run against the data sources. They can be modified and copied for a particular
enterprise's needs or used as is.
Report Resource (Visualization Configuration for Query Results)
A report is a new resource that represents a persisted visualization configuration for a set of
query results. A report can be a table or a chart of the results and can be deployed into a
dashboard. Now a report can be configured completely using the query results UI without any
advanced understanding of the raw configuration options. A report is deployed into a
dashboard catalog and can be placed from within any CLM dashboard once it is available
there.
Parameterization of Reports
A powerful capability of the report resource is the ability to parameterize the results so that
they can be filtered based on values entered by the end user. The idea is that the query asks
for a super-set of the data and provides variables that pull in the data. Then when defining
the report, you can “parameterize” those variables to be filtered to specific values. As an
example, if you have a query that looks for all resolved work items, you can add a parameter
to the report that asks for a particular iteration that the work item was resolved in. Then when
the report is added to the dashboard, the parameter value can be specified so that it will only
display results filtered by that parameter value.
Release Notes:
1. Data warehouse queries do not consider database access control in Sprint 3. For
example, if Bob has access to Project area P1 and P2 and Sally has access to only P1,
Sally should only be able to see data that is pulled from the P1 Project area. Currently,
the query will not discriminate and all data is visible to all users. This issue will be
rectified in our next Sprint (S4).
2. Query Builder
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In Sprint 3 it is not possible to select the columns from the query that would be
displayed in a table. Currently, for SPARQL LQE data sources the query builder will
select the title and URI of all the resources involved in the query. For SQL the query
builder will select all the columns of all the tables which can result in a non-optimal
results table due to some formatting issues with the size of individual columns.
◦
SQL Query generation works only for the first resource and relationship path that
propagates from it. Subsequent resources in the group are ignored.