[Toolserver-l] collaborative report generator?

[Nikola Smolenski]

On Saturday 13 September 2008 08:58:23 River Tarnell wrote:
> 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:

Yes, this is an excellent idea! :) Most of my tools 
(http://toolserver.org/~nikola/ - articlesby, grep, namestats, whatlinks) are 
built basically in the way you describe. And I have ideas for more, but they 
would surely be easier to make and use with the report tool.

> 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.

Add wiki syntax to the list of exports :)

Have some practical ideas, will write about them later.