Customizing Report Defitions

Logi Info includes a technology called Definition Modifier Files (DMF). A DMF is an XML file that contains instructions to modify a definition file's elements and their attributes at runtime. It's a separate file that's processed before the Logi Server Engine starts to render a report definition. At that time, elements may be conditionally inserted or removed, and attributes may be set or unset. This makes it possible to set culture- or customer-specific values based, for example, on locale or security roles, at run-time. This means that each user can potentially receive a different report because the definition used to generate their report has been customized for them, on the fly. DMFs are similar to the Template Modifier Files, mentioned in Customizing Super-Element Interfaces , and they're also conceptually similar to a plug-in that executes on the "LoadDefinition" event. In this context, you might think of them as the "poor man's plug-in": they can provide similar functionality but don't require additional development tools (Visual Studio, etc.) to write and compile a plug-in .dll or .jar file. To assist with globalization, a DMF could be used, for example, to perform language translation. XPath notation can be used in a DMF to find and replace specific strings of text anywhere in a report definition, in order to translate them into another language on-the-fly. You could even have a different DMF for each language supported and tokenize the DMF name in your report definition so that you can support multiple languages automatically. This subject is discussed in detail in Template Modifier Files.