| Summary: | 博士 === 國立臺北科技大學 === 資訊工程系研究所 === 100 === Report generation is arguably the most important task for database and web appli-cations. A report is usually designed by a report designer who is not necessarily a pro-grammer. Therefore, many researches and tools have been proposed to simplify report generation for report designers. However, these simplifications usually limit the kinds of report layouts that can be produced. Moreover, current methodologies do not support WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) format editor.
To overcome the above problems, this dissertation proposes a visual programming language, called Visual Table Presentation Language (VisualTPL), for report generation. With VisualTPL, a report designer can use a set of high-level layout transformation components to convert the layout of source data to the layout of the target report. A vis-ual development environment for VisualTPL is developed, called VisualTPS. VisualTPS also provides a WYSIWYG format editor supporting a number of formatting rules de-signed specifically for nested reports.
An evaluation has been conducted to understand end-users’ performance and pref-erences with VisualTPS. The results indicated that the participants have similar perfor-mances with VisualTPL and commercial tools, and the participants preferred VisualTPL. Since VisualTPL is more flexible than commercial tools, VisualTPL is a good choice when an end-user needs to create report layouts that are not supported by commercial report tools. In addition, the end-users can learn the WYSIWYG format editor quickly and use the editor to format nested report efficiently.
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