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In this chapter, we've addressed some of the issues surrounding batch processing and report generating in a distributed, object-oriented environment.
What we created in this chapter is a basic but functional batch-queue processor that allows us easily to submit tasks that will be run on a server machine. This batch server might be the database serverthus avoiding the network transfer of large volumes of dataor it might be an application server that has a high-speed network connection to the database server. Either way, it's likely that the processing of batch jobs on such a server will be more efficient than running the same task on a client workstation or web server.
The object-oriented nature of our applications poses particular challenges, especially with reporting. Commercial reporting engines don't support the concept of binding a report to objects, thereby rendering them nearly useless for reporting in an object-oriented environment. Though we can use these report engines in an unbound mode and manually provide them with data from our objects, that's a lot more work than binding the report to a DataSet !
To overcome this, we created the ObjectAdapter class, which makes it very easy to populate a DataSet with data from an object or collection of objects. Once our object data is loaded into a DataSet , we can use the features of standard reporting engines to generate reports based on the data with ease.
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