Sofico Miles: “auto & asset finance, leasing, fleet and mobility management software”

• http://www.sofico.be/solutions/benefits/finance
• http://www.sofico.be/solutions/markets/vehicle-leasing-rental : “Managing the entire leasing process efficiently“

They are using Oracle DB as RDBMS and JasperReports for creating PDF documents.

Yesterday I attended a one day introduction to their data model, called GALAXY.

They supply their customers with sample JaspersReports documents, actually “.jasper” files. “.jasper” files can be losslessly transformed to JRXML files. JRXML files can get operated on and inspected in iReport, a GUI editor – but in fact you are not able to preview or even print these samples. For “running” a JRXML (or “.jasper”) file, you need to supply parameters and the framework will run a SQL query to retrieve data from the database. If you are just starting to explore the supplied samples, you don’t want to bother with those parameters and the data available in your database – you just want to print the sample documents with the fieldnames printed themselves (resp. something descriptive at least) instead of sample values. But Sofico do not supply you with any such documents or documentation.

I guess I am going to prepare “a couple of” such documents “for myself” next week – “sample invoice” etc. look quite intriguing.

I really wonder, how the SQL for filling this kind of documents looks like. Usually in the RDBMS context you are operating on a cursor, to retrieve “sister details” efficiently. But how would you deal with a kind of cursor in this context? (PL/SQL?!?)

For creating my “meta documents” I won’t use iReport – but rather my favourite text editor “in XML mode” (i.e. GNU Emacs with nxml-mode). I am really, really excited to start that – but this is Friday afternoon, just a little before Kabbalat Shabbat, and no access to the sample documents – what a pity!

In our Sofico Miles implemtation project my task is to create business documents – maybe similar to the sample documents – but I (we?) don’t really know. Searching the database views (the GALAXY) for the proper details (needed for filling the business documents) looks just too fatiguing – I rather learn and copy from these sample documents – actually that looks like the way, that Sofico teaches their customers to learn themselves how to deal with their data model.