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LReport is a toolkit for comparing data stored in databases and in csv files. It is written in perl and can be used as command line utility or a perl modules from your code.

LReport also provides tools, which support nice formating of data retrieved from the database or csv files.

The project is hosted on Source Forge.

If you have any comments please post a message in project's forums.

For quick start go to tutorial. 

What is LReport

The purpose

I started writing LReport as a tool supporting me in my job as a tester. The initial goal was to create a script, which will run a given select and will nicely format it's results. When you test business applications, documenting database contents is a necessity and a pain.

In the course of implementation I have realized, that a task can be divided on 2 parts - retrieving and comparing data, and formating them. Those 2 tasks can be done independently. 

  • The comparison is done by lcsvdiff.pl, which compares row sets (stored in database or in csv files).
  • Formating is done by a tool-chain - lrptxml.pl, which converts row set to xml file and then a set of xsl stylesheet converts the xml to RTF format document

The problem

In all projects I was in as a tester, documenting database contents was always a problem. When you think about it, there are 2 extrema. One extremum is that you put in your report only data, which you consider important. That means that you report only important tables and only important columns of these tables.
On the other side, you can report all tables, which may be affected by executed actions and if you report any table, you report all columns.
Whatever the approach, reports are created by copying and pasting selects' results from tools like OraTool, Rapid SQL, SqlPlus, isql etc. This way of doing things works fine for many projects, but I believe there is some space for significant improvement here.
The common approach I was describing above has the following problems

  • Copying and pasting is a tedious and boring task (hence, error prone), especially if you require to report contents of many tables.
  • It is very easy to miss differences between before and after test state of the data.
  • There is a contradiction between readability and completness of the report
I think that the first and the second point needs no further explanation. However, the third does.
If you place only selected columns from selected tables, nicely formated - then your report is readable. But there are 2 problems with going this way:
  1. It is time consuming. Instead of "select *" you have to type "select column1, column2, ...etc". No big deal if you do it once for one table. It becames a problem if you have to explicitly specify columns for several tables. Also nice formating is time consuming. It is not going to take much time to convert copied and pasted stuff into tables and apply some shading and coloring once. But if you are executing several test cases, this time becomes significant.
  2. There is a risk that you miss some data, which were actually important. Later on when you analyze the test case, you will realize that some tables or columns contained really important data. But it will be to late. The data will be gone

Pasting all columns from many tables has the advantage of completness. But this kind of reports are hardly readable, especially when you report many tables and some of them contains 80 or more columns.

So the design goals for LReport was to:
  1. Automaticaly create nicely formated reports from selected tables.
  2. Automate finding differences between results of the group of selects
  3. Find a solution to readability vs completeness contradiction
  4. Ease of use