I brainstormed with my report dev and we came up with two valuable JART expansions.

The first is coded and has already found two bugs (and saved me from days of bordom). Comprehensive data checking in the report output is complicated but what about checking for data that is missing? My reports display the string “[Not Found]” when data fields get mapped incorrectly or other datasource problems occur. It only took about an hour to write a function that scans all report results looking for the string. Since JART already exported each report result to a text file, I simply automated Notepad’s Find functionalty to look for specific strings passed into my SearchReportResultsForString function. This was way easy. Now JART checks about 2240 distinct data columns across 113 reports for this issue.

I use said function to also look for the “No Data Found” string. If I find this string it means the report results returned but other than the cover page, no data matching the search criteria exists. This check gets reported as a “Warning” or inconclusive result. I use it to help me determine when I need to adjust my filter criteria parameters on each report.

The second expansion is to build a routine that saves off the report results of each iteration as “Iteration N Baselines”. Then, using the same report filter criteria and same data store, save off the next iteration’s report results as “Iteration N+1 Baselines”. Once JART has at least two iterations of baselines, JART will compare the files from each baseline to ensure nothing has changed. If I can pull this off, it will be HUGE. I’m expecting it to only support about 75% of my reports. The other 25% is time sensitive data that may not have a way to remain frozen in time.

Yesterday, a dev pointed out that the reports display the report execution date (i.e., the current date) in the header and footer. Thus, they should never match. Ooops! I think I can still work around it, but it does complicate things a bit.