Report Development Life Cycle
Contents
Introduction
Explore Analytics is designed for ad-hoc data exploration in which users are encourages to create and modify reports on the fly.
Explore Analytics could also support a more traditional development life cycle in which reports are developed in a development environment, tested in a test environment, and then migrated to production where they are locked to prevent change.
This page describes how to use Explore Analytics with such a traditional development life cycle.
Setting up a Development, Test, and Production environments
To separate the environments you can create multiple data sources. This is especially useful if you actually have separate data sources for your application's development, test, and production, but even if you don't, consider defining multiple data sources that are defined identically.
Development
Create views against the tables in your Development data source. When you list views for a table, those will be all development views.
Migrating Views
To migrate or promote a view from one environment to the next, for example from development to test or production, you can export the view's definition and import it to the corresponding table in the test or production data source. The next section explains how to export and import view definition.
Exporting View Definition
Exporting view definition creates and downloads an XML file. This file has the complete definition of the view. As such, it can serve several purposes:
- Use it to import the view into your test or production environment thereby migrating/promoting it
- Save it as a backup of the view definition
- Check it into a version control system. This could allow you later to retrieve older versions of the view
To export a view's definition you can use one of these options:
- When the view is displaying, select "Export view definition" from the File menu
- Alternatively, in a list of view, for example in a list of views for a table, use the context menu to select "Export view definition".
The view XML file will be downloaded. It has the name of the view as the name of the file with a ".xml" extension.
Importing View Definition
To import a view:
- Start by going to "Browse data sources and tables" using the "Data" menu.
- Select the data source that corresponds to the environment (e.g., production) that you want to import to.
- Select the table for which this view was created. The table must match the table from your development environment and have the same fields.
- If prompted to create a new view, click cancel. It's just that your table currently has no views.
- The current list of views for you table is showing.
- Select "Import view definition" from the "Data" menu.
- Select the XML file that you wish to upload and import.
If a view by the same name already exist, you'll be prompted to click "Yes" to overwrite it, or click "No" to create a new view. If you click "No", you'll see a new view in the list. The view will have the same name. You can distinguish it by its date (Updated) and you should then rename it (which you can do using the context menu.)
