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45

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Hi all,

I need to build a system that generates reports on data exceptions (e.g. this value is stale because it hasn't been updated in x days). Once they have a daily report on data quality issues my users would like to have a bunch of filtering capability (with customizable public and private filters) and then be able to categorize and comment on the issues ideally directly in the reporting interface. So an issue could be categorized as "Not a big deal" or something like that and a comment entered explaining why it's all good. Then that issue will be excluded from the general issues report going forward even if the data exception behind it persists.

So it looks like a data quality reporting tool but also behaves something like an issue tracker. I've considered just automatically generating an issue in one of our bug tracker tools for every data exception we find so we would get filters and workflow for free, but I don't think that will fly. The bug list isn't a very good reporting interface. I've been trying to figure out if Crystal Reports would let me do something like this where I can comment on and categorize report contents, but I can't find anything on their site that makes me think you can.

Seems like this is fairly generic in function though, and I'm hoping I don't need to build it from scratch because of the time frames involved. Has anybody seen something like this done before? Are there .NET tools that would make this easier and maybe solve the tricky issues like building public and private filters and concurrent editing of records through report interfaces.

Thanks very much for any ideas you might have.

A: 

An issue tracking platform like Gemini would help as long as you:

  1. Automate the capture of such data exceptions (e.g. via API of issue tracker)
  2. Clearly mark such data exceptions by using a relevant Issue Type
  3. Clearly mark the items to ignore (e.g. change Issue Resolution to "Ignore"
  4. Set up custom Issue Filters that will pull back the relevant data for reporting/viewing/exporting

Gemini does have an adhoc reporting capability that will run n your saved filters (graphs, data tables). These reports can be saved and executed/shared as required.

nullvoid