Data Sources
In Blingalytics, sources implement an interface between the report and the
original source data.
For example, the database source provides an interface for doing sums and
counts over database columns; the derived source allows you to perform
calculations over columns from other sources; and the merge source allows
you to pull data from other reports and produce a sort of meta-report.
When writing a report, the sources you choose to use will provide you with
some or all of the following:
- Column types, which define how and where the source gets the data for
that column.
- Filters, which you or the end user (through user input widgets) can use
to filter the source data for the report.
- Key ranges, which the report uses to determine which rows to produce.
The documentation for each of the sources provides more in-depth information.
Standard column options
Most columns will require or accept certain arguments specific to their use
case, but all column types accept the following optional standard arguments:
- format: A format class or instance that should be used to determine the
formatting and display options for this column. If omitted, the column
defaults to being hidden. See Column formatters for more.
- footer: Most numeric data columns will calculate a sum for the footer
by default. String data columns have no footer by default. Each column’s
documentation will specify if it has any non-standard footer handling. For
any column, if you wish to disable the footer, you can set this to
False.
Standard filter options
Most filters also require or accept arguments specific to their use case, but
all filters accept the following optional standard arguments:
- columns: If one or more columns are provided, the filter should only be
applied to the given columns. Other columns should remain unaffected. The
columns may be specified as a string (for just one column) or a list of
strings, specifying the column names to filter. Defaults to None, which
applies the filter to all columns in the report.
- widget: A widget class or instance that defines the widget type the user
should be shown to input a filter argument. Defaults to None. See
User-input widgets for more.