VisualTPL: A visual dataflow language for report data transformation

Author-Highlights
• A visual language, VisualTPL, is proposed to specify data transformation.
• VisualTPL supports top-down and incremental development of report layouts.
• An evaluation has been conducted to assess end-users' preference and performance.
• For the reports used in the evaluation, VisualTPL can be learned in a short time.
• End-users showed significant preference for VisualTPL over a commercial tool.

Data transformation, an important part of report generation, converts the layout of source data into a new layout suitable for presentation. Many report tools have been developed for end-users to specify data transformation. However, current report tools only support a limited set of report layouts. This paper proposes a visual dataflow programming language, called VisualTPL, to resolve this problem. Data transformation is accomplished by writing graphical dataflow programs, which manipulate tables as first-class objects with a set of extendable table operations. A report tool, called VisualTPS, has been developed to offer an easy and intuitive end-user programming environment. Reports with sophisticated layouts can be created through top-down decomposition and incremental development. An evaluation has been conducted to assess end-users' performance with VisualTPL. The results indicated that end-users could learn VisualTPL in a short time and create complicated report layouts all by themselves. And, in comparison with a commercial report tool, VisualTPL offered end-users similar performances and was preferred over the commercial tool.