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Report Generation with DataDirect XQuery®

Report Generation is made much easier by DataDirect XQuery®. XQuery is extremely useful for XML reporting, and the resulting XML is easily published to many different formats. This makes XQuery ideal for database publishing applications, since XQuery can create an infinite number of logical views of the data, which can be used in many different environments by publishing them as HTML, PDF, PostScript, or other formats. The following diagram illustrates this process.

XML Reporting

There are many useful ways to look at your data — for instance, if you have a collection of invoices, you may want to show the orders for a given customer, the orders for a given product, or the totals for a given region or sales agent. Just as a relational report writer can be used to create different logical views of relational data, XQuery can be used as an XML report writer, creating different logical views of XML and relational data in an XML format. XML reporting makes your data more useful by letting you see it from different perspectives. And if you are exchanging data as XML, XML reporting lets you more easily create XML documents with the required structure.

XML Publishing

XML is easily formatted and converted for human beings. Many applications can use XQuery as a report writing language, then publish the report using standard XML publishing tools. XSLT, XSL:FO, and other tools for converting XML to HTML, help systems, PDF, and PostScript are mature enough that some mainstream commercial publishers use XML to publish books.