[RFC] Status on global filter implementation

[Francis J. Lacoste]

Basic functionality for global filters is now implemented in CVS.
The DNS superservice was updated to use it.

The only thing left to implement is to add informations about the
filters used in the final report. 

We originally talked about putting a automatic description after
each reports:

Top 10 ....
filters applied: XXX

XXX would be replaced by the display-spec/title element of the filters.

I saw one problem with that: Report-spec can already include a description.
We would need to merge that description with the automatic one, 
and since we use pre-compiled descriptions (for the text reports), 
this would be relatively complicated to implement.

I came up with a better idea : report's sections.

This has several advantages:

- Related reports could be grouped together under one heading. 
- (X)HTML could generate one page by section.
- The global-filters applied would get listed in the section's
  description.

Here are the changes to be made:

* New directive in the report configuration file (dns.cfg)

=section Section's title 

(This is already implemented in Lire::ReportConfig)

* Add a <lire:section> element to lire.dtd to group the subreports.

* The overall syntax of the configuration file becomes

((=section <Title>)?
 (|filter_id <params>*)*
 (report_id <params>*)+)

This means that a global-filter not preceded by a =section directive
still introduce a section. (We could also make it mandatory to have 
a =section preceding a |filter_id.)
Global filters are reset on each new section. (We don't need the 
|filter_none or |filter_reset 'magic' filter's id.)

I think this makes it a lot clearer. To see, how it looks like in the
field, here is the new DNS configuration file:

=section All Requests
top-requesting-hosts               hosts_to_show=10
top-requested-names                names_to_show=10
requesttype-distribution
requests-by-period                 period=1d

=section Recursive Requests
|select-resolver		   method="recurs"
top-requesting-hosts               hosts_to_show=10
top-requested-names                names_to_show=10
requesttype-distribution
requests-by-period                 period=1d

=section Non Recursive Requests
|select-resolver		   method="nonrec"
top-requesting-hosts               hosts_to_show=10
top-requested-names                names_to_show=10
requesttype-distribution
requests-by-period                 period=1d

* Implement support for <lire:section> in the output formatter.

-- 
Francis J. Lacoste
francis at Contre.COM
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 232 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://lists.logreport.org/pipermail/development/attachments/20020116/28d460ca/attachment.bin