| Client: | Department of Children & Family |
| Category: | Massachusetts Government Department |
| Date: | 01 May 2018 |
| Status: | Completed |
| Location: | US |
| Tags: | Information Technology, Analytics |
Company Overview
The “Department of Children and Families (DCF)” works in partnership with families and communities to keep children safe from abuse and neglect. When necessary, DCF provides foster care or finds new permanent families for children through kinship, guardianship or adoption. DCF cares for children of all ages from infancy to 18, and from all ethnic and economic backgrounds. Most of the children are being adopted.
Basically, DCF keeps counts of children going into foster care for a particular time and to a particular region, any kind of maltreatment, exit reasons etc.
DCF generally uses reports to measure the population of a certain region and to monitor the status of the children. All the reporting and analytics could be categorized into two different categories-
- The population of kids who have a goal of adoption or Guardianship for a specific time period.
- The population of kids who have been finalized with Adoption or Guardianship.
DCF was using Oracle Discoverer to generate these reports. But Oracle Discoverer is no longer a supported product and had a poor performance. In addition to this, these two separate report categories were on two different domains and the idea was to render them in a single dashboard with graphical representations of different populations.
So, they wanted to move ahead and replicate the existing functionality of all the 30 reports in a more efficient and supported environment. Along with that they also wanted their existing reports to be further customized with additional features.
Jaspersoft Community Edition 6.2 was used and the entire reports development was done using Jasper Studio.
Many of these reports were also having drill down capabilities as well as multiple input parameters allowing seeing detailed data. Some of the input parameters were State, region etc. There were other kind of functionalities, drill down, custom plugins etc were developed as well.
DB used – Oracle
BI tool – Jaspersoft 6.2, Jasper Studio
Cloud Service – Amazon Web Services (AWS)
There are various kinds of functionalities which client was looking for but it was not one of the direct features of Jaspersoft. Via custom coding we were able to achieve these functionalities as well. Some of the examples of the same are mentioned below.-
- Oracle Discoverer allows a tabbed view wherein an end user can view different reports by clicking on different tabs. But Jaspersoft does not provide this facility. However we were able to achieve this functionality using custom coding. Via custom coding we had created different tabs and once a user clicks on those tabs we were rendering built Jasper reports associated with that respective tab.
- Oracle Discoverer allows ability to drill down and open multiple reports on single click event. But such kind of feature is not possible inside Jaspersoft. Jaspersoft only has single Parent-Child Relationship i.e. from one report I can drill down and open only one detailed report. Hence in order to achieve something similar to this requirement we had allowed an end user to see list of drill down reports he can open from the parent report on tooltip. So then he can click on any one or multiple reports on the tooltip and can open multiple drill down reports also.
- Challenge
-
DCF generally uses reports to measure the population of a certain region and to monitor the status of the children. All the reporting and analytics could be categorized into two different categories-
- The population of kids who have a goal of adoption or Guardianship for a specific time period.
- The population of kids who have been finalized with Adoption or Guardianship.
DCF was using Oracle Discoverer to generate these reports. But Oracle Discoverer is no longer a supported product and had a poor performance. In addition to this, these two separate report categories were on two different domains and the idea was to render them in a single dashboard with graphical representations of different populations.
So, they wanted to move ahead and replicate the existing functionality of all the 30 reports in a more efficient and supported environment. Along with that they also wanted their existing reports to be further customized with additional features.
- Solution
-
Jaspersoft Community Edition 6.2 was used and the entire reports development was done using Jasper Studio.
Many of these reports were also having drill down capabilities as well as multiple input parameters allowing seeing detailed data. Some of the input parameters were State, region etc. There were other kind of functionalities, drill down, custom plugins etc were developed as well.
- Tools and Technologies
-
DB used – Oracle
BI tool – Jaspersoft 6.2, Jasper Studio
Cloud Service – Amazon Web Services (AWS)
- Custom Development on Jaspersoft
-
There are various kinds of functionalities which client was looking for but it was not one of the direct features of Jaspersoft. Via custom coding we were able to achieve these functionalities as well. Some of the examples of the same are mentioned below.-
- Oracle Discoverer allows a tabbed view wherein an end user can view different reports by clicking on different tabs. But Jaspersoft does not provide this facility. However we were able to achieve this functionality using custom coding. Via custom coding we had created different tabs and once a user clicks on those tabs we were rendering built Jasper reports associated with that respective tab.
- Oracle Discoverer allows ability to drill down and open multiple reports on single click event. But such kind of feature is not possible inside Jaspersoft. Jaspersoft only has single Parent-Child Relationship i.e. from one report I can drill down and open only one detailed report. Hence in order to achieve something similar to this requirement we had allowed an end user to see list of drill down reports he can open from the parent report on tooltip. So then he can click on any one or multiple reports on the tooltip and can open multiple drill down reports also.
