i-net Clear Reports Repository

Design, Store, Publish. i-net Clear Reports Repository

Note: the legacy Report Repository is superseded by the Drive application

i-net Clear Reports PLUS offers a unified storage place for your reports. It is perfect for storing your reports, editing them, running them, and sharing them with others.

Users with appropriate permissions to the repository can fetch, store, tag, search, and run reports on the server itself instead of locally. Especially in environments with multiple report designers, this provides the advantage of centralizing reports and allowing for efficient storage and organization of company-wide reports.

Overview

The Repository offers a web-based view similar to a file browser, displaying a folder structure and the report files, enabling you to quickly:

re-organize the repository
move, copy, rename files and folders
manage security settings (access, write and execute)
execute reports
edit reports with the remote i-net Designer

The Repository feature can be accessed through various different interfaces:

Remote Repository Browser via the web-based Remote GUI
directly from your i-net Designer on your local computer
Web-DAV access from your computer's file browser
some features are available via XML-RPC

Configuration

You can configure your repository using the Remote Configuration Manager and create and manage multiple repositories, either hard-disk or database based. However, you will always only have one active repository at a time.

In addition to activating your repository you should take a look at your System Permissions to secure your repository properly.

Important: Please note, that the repository does not offer any version control or backup mechanism. To avoid accidental loss of data such as your report templates we encourage you to use third-party programs.

Security aspects

Besides managing the structure of your repository, you can set the report permissions as needed directly from within the Remote Repository Browser. The permissions resemble UNIX permissions: read, write and execute:

the read permission is for seeing the file in the repository and downloading the content.
the write permission lets you create new and modify existing report files.
executing a report is about running the report on the server.

The Remote Designer checks for these permissions as well.

For more information, see the Security Guide.

Scenarios

Using the permissions individually results in several possible usage scenarios e.g.:

read-only permission results in a see and download only scenario where users can download reports - or report templates - to their local computer and create reports from there
users with execute-only permissions may not be allowed to actually see a report template file in the repository, but may run the report to see the results. This can be useful e.g. for demo repositories, where you want a public section with all the reports in it and a hidden but executable section which has reports that are linked on a website.

Render a Report

To render a report, simply double-click it and pick an export format from the popup box. The toolbar offers a button for rendering as well. Click it and pick an export format from the drop down box.

Modify a Report

If you want to modify the report, you can select the “Open report with remote Designer” button and the i-net Designer program will be downloaded to your computer as a JNLP application. The Designer program can be executed without installing it.