I have two reporting systems that are pretty complex and require multiple levels of security. After working with the CSLA framework, I am thinking I could implement the reports with each row of the report being a Business Object and the whole report being a Business Object Collection.
Then I could implement Authorization the same as normal. This would allow me to portability of moving the reports to web or windows forms as well.
I am a while from moving on this idea, but has anyone done anything like this yet? If so, can you give me any pointers on what pitfalls to look out for?
We stored what reports were available and the parameters they needed in 2 database tables and created business objects based on those so that we could tap into the security and only show the reports available to security cleared users in our UI. We had simple properties indicating if the report was a management report or not - we had a simple security model but there's no reason why you couldn't have a ReportRoles object.
The actual report data was returned as a DataSet in our application as we were stuffing this straight into Crystal Reports and then later ASP Grids. We didn't feel the need to convert the report data into business objects, primarily as Crystal is happier with a goold old fashioned DataSet.
Hope this helps.
Copyright (c) Marimer LLC