Automatic Layout of Structured Hierarchical Reports

Bakke, Eirik; Karger, David R.; Miller, Robert C.

doi:10.1109/tvcg.2013.137

Cited by 8 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 34 publications

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“…a graphical equivalent of a nested data model such as XML, JSON, or nested relations. This handles report-style queries that encode multiple parallel one-to-many relationships in a single result, as when retrieving "a list of parts, and for each part a list of suppliers and a list of open orders" [11]. Systems that base their result representation on a single flat table of primitive values, such as Tableau [99], are unable to express such queries.…”

Section: Visual Query Systemsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Expressive Query Construction through Direct Manipulation of Nested Relational Results

Bakke

Karger

2016

Proceedings of the 2016 International Conference on Management of Data

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Despite extensive research on visual query systems, the standard way to interact with relational databases remains to be through SQL queries and tailored form interfaces. This makes the power of relational databases largely inaccessible to non-programmers. This thesis proposes a solution, in two parts.The first contribution of this thesis is a solution to the visual query language problem, that is, the problem of letting end users construct arbitrary database queries through a graphical user interface. We propose the first visual query language to simultaneously satisfy three requirements: (1) query specification through direct manipulation of results, (2) the ability to view and modify any part of the current query without departing from the direct manipulation interface, and (3) SQL-like expressiveness. By directly manipulating nested relational results, and using spreadsheet idioms such as formulas and filters, the user can express arbitrary SQL-92 queries while always remaining able to track and modify the state of the complete query.The second contribution of this thesis is an algorithm for automatically formatting nested relational data using the traditional visual idioms of hand-designed database UIs: tables, multi-column forms, and outline-style indented lists. The algorithm plugs directly into the output stage of our visual query language, and produces the concrete graphics that the user sees and manipulates on the screen during query construction. The algorithm eliminates the need for an application developer to specify low-level presentation details such as label placements, text field dimensions, table column widths, and list styles.Our prototype visual query system gives the user an experience of responsive, incremental query building while pushing all actual query processing to the database layer. We evaluate the query building aspects of our system with formative and controlled user studies on a total of 28 spreadsheet users. The controlled study shows our system outperforming Microsoft Access by 18 points on the System Usability Scale [17]; this corresponds to a 46 percentage point difference on a percentile scale of other studies in the Business Software category. We also evaluate the different layouts that can be produced by our automatic layout algorithm, including via an online user study on 27 subjects.

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Section: Visual Query Systemsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Expressive Query Construction through Direct Manipulation of Nested Relational Results

Bakke

Karger

2016

Proceedings of the 2016 International Conference on Management of Data

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“…Support a spreadsheet-like interface that upholds the properties that make spreadsheets easy to use and understand. 4. Keep the design simple so we could produce a reasonably complete prototype demonstrating the essential characteristics of the system with modest development effort.…”

Section: Data Modelmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…We designed Object Spreadsheets to present data hierarchically because hierarchy is widely accepted as an understandable and efficient approach to presenting structured data, as in [4]. However, this does not fully determine our choice of data model because a hierarchical view can be implemented on top of any data model that can represent relationships between objects, including the relational and network models.…”

Section: Rationalementioning

confidence: 99%

Object spreadsheets: a new computational model for end-user development of data-centric web applications

McCutchen

Itzhaky

Jackson

2016

Proceedings of the 2016 ACM International Symposium on New Ideas, New Paradigms, and Reflections on Programming and Software

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Spreadsheets offer many advantages as the computational and data-storage engine for applications that are authored by end users. Paradoxically, however, their main failing in this regard is their computational model. Despite being used in almost all cases to represent data that is essentially relational (with some hierarchical structuring), the spreadsheet model treats the two-dimensional grid as largely unstructured, with formulas linking cells in an ad hoc way. This paper reports on a quest to rethink the spreadsheet model. The model we propose supports not only conventional flat tables, but also nested variable-size lists and object references. It includes a formula language suited to the data model and procedures to specify updates. The model has been implemented in a tool called Object Spreadsheets, which is intended for the development of data-centric web applications. We describe several example applications we built using the tool to demonstrate its applicability.

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“…Bakke et al [7] recently designed a direct manipulation interface for nested-relational databases, and DataPlay [3] also used the nested model for presenting query results. However, the model suffers from scalability issues because the sizes of the nested tables often become huge when an inner table contains a large number of associated rows or columns [8]. One way to tackle this problem is to replace the inner table with a set of pointers.…”

Section: Data Models For Effective Presentationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Interactive browsing and navigation in relational databases

et al. 2016

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Although researchers have devoted considerable attention to helping database users formulate queries, many users still find it challenging to specify queries that involve joining tables. To help users construct join queries for exploring relational databases, we propose ETable, a novel presentation data model that provides users with a presentation-level interactive view. This view compactly presents one-to-many and many-to-many relationships within a single enriched table by allowing a cell to contain a set of entity references. Users can directly interact with this enriched table to incrementally construct complex queries and navigate databases on a conceptual entity-relationship level. In a user study, participants performed a range of database querying tasks faster with ETable than with a commercial graphical query builder. Subjective feedback about ETable was also positive. All participants found that ETable was easier to learn and helpful for exploring databases.

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Automatic Layout of Structured Hierarchical Reports

Cited by 8 publications

References 34 publications

Expressive Query Construction through Direct Manipulation of Nested Relational Results

Expressive Query Construction through Direct Manipulation of Nested Relational Results

Object spreadsheets: a new computational model for end-user development of data-centric web applications

Interactive browsing and navigation in relational databases

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