Hi Charles
The Snapshot facility relies on a detailed 'understanding' of the model and the way it was used to build the output you see in the results window. Unfortunately for XML reports the way the underlying data decomposes into various tables is not understood by Recorder, so the Snapshot Wizard as it stands won't work. However, we have already got an item on the Future Developments page to enable a single table snapshot to be generated from an XML report titled 'Simple Snapshot'. Thinking about it, we could allow additional model information to be optionally embedded into the XML report enabling a much more powerful snapshot.
For those who haven't tried it, the Snapshot tool takes the output from the Report Wizard and generates a simplified version of the data model in a user defined number of tables. For example, you can have just a single table with all data in it, or you can configure it to have a table for taxon name information, a table for occurrence information and a table for sample information giving a very simple 3 table model. If you have an XML report that outputs a bunch of location fields and a location key, plus perhaps a bunch of location data fields it would be nice to be able to snapshot this into one or 2 tables, depending on what you intend to do with the data. All we would need to do is add the 'Snapshot destination table' as an attribute of the columns defined in the report plus a definition of how the possible tables relate and it would be quite possible to output to any data model you like.
Combine this facility with a snapshot scheduling facility (also on the Future Developments list) and you have a fantastic facility for generating data warehouses for reporting or driving web sites.
Thoughts anyone?
John van Breda
Biodiverse IT
