SUMMARYReport generation is one of the most important tasks for database and e-commerce applications. Current report tools typically provide a set of predefined components that are used to specify report layout and format. However, available layout options are limited, and WYSIWYG formatting is not allowed. This paper proposes a four-phase report generation process to overcome these problems. The first phase retrieves source tables from the database. The second phase reorganizes the layout of the source tables by transferring the source tables into a set of new flat tables (in the first normal form). The third phase restructures the flat tables into a nested table (report) by specifying the report structure. The last phase formats the report with a WYSIWYG format editor supporting a number of formatting rules designed specifically for nested reports. Each phase of the proposed process supports visual programming, giving an easy-to-use user interface and allowing very flexible report layouts and formats. A visual end-user-programming tool, called TPS, is developed to demonstrate the proposed process and show that reports with sophisticated layouts can be created without writing low-level report generation programs.
This paper proposes a visual programming language, called VisualTPL, to perform data transformation in report generation. In VisualTPL, data transformation is accomplished by writing graphical dataflow programs, which manipulate tables as first-class objects with a set of table operations. Based on VisualTPL, a visual programming environment, called VisualTPS, has been developed. As demonstrated with an example, data transformation programming is easy and intuitive in VisualTPS. Tables with sophisticated layouts can be created through top-down decomposition and incremental development.
Programming assignments (PAs) are very important to many computer science courses. Traditionally, the grading of a programming assignment is based mainly on the correctness of the code. However, from the view point of software engineering education, such a grading does not encourage students to develop code that is easy to read and maintain. Thus, the authors created a grading policy that considers not only the correctness but also the quality of the code, expecting students to follow the most important disciplinethe source code should be written in a way that is readable and maintainable. Instead of using pure subjective codequality ratings, bad smells are used to assess the code quality of PAs. When a PA is graded by the teaching assistant, a list of bad smells is identified and given to the student so that the student can use refactoring methods to improve the code.
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