[Toolserver-l] collaborative report generator?

[River Tarnell]

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so, it's quite common that people want various kinds of reports on wikis, which
are usually generated by a standard SQL query.  in fact, this is so common that
we have the "query service" to handle these requests.

this isn't the most efficient way to do it, though; a toolserver user has to
run the actual query, and if it's meant to be a regular report, they need to
crontab it to run as needed.  there's a lot of duplication of effort.

instead, what about a collaborative 'report' tool?  i would envisage this
working as follows: each query (for example, '100 users with most edits') is
described in a file.  the exact way isn't that important, but for the sake of
example, the file might look like this:

 name=Top 100 editors
 # For a slow query, run it once a day from crontab.  Faster queries could be
 # done on demand (for example, 'when=immediately'), or cached for a certain
 # period of time (for example, 'cache=1h').
 when=nightly
 query=SELECT ...

then for users, there's a web interface where they can select the wiki and the
report they want to run.  for queries that need parameters (e.g. those that
report on a particular article), they could select the article (preferably with
a nice ajaxy input box).  then the SQL might look like:

 SELECT ... WHERE page_namespace=<NAMESPACE> AND page_title=<TITLE>

<NAMESPACE> and <TITLE> would be filled in by the report generator.

the web interface would display the result of the query in a nice,
easy-to-read table (and probably with some kind of XML or CSV export feature).
any project developer would be able to add new queries, which users could
request in JIRA.

as the project would have many developers, i envisage it running on the stable
server.  if people are actually interested in doing this, i'd be willing to
create at least the basic framework (hopefully the interface would have several
maintainers who would add nice features).

opinions?

	- river.
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