The differences between WYSIWYG editor and ARIS Scripting

Reports are a means of documenting, evaluating, and analyzing database content in a context-related way. You can select the content in the navigation tree, in models or search results, etc., and transfer the information to other programs, such as MS Word, MS Excel, or MS Internet Explorer, by using the corresponding output format.

The ARIS Platform products have a built-in reporting engine, which you can use to create your custom reports to support your decision making. ARIS provides different ways of creatingsuch reports.You can use the built-in WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor or you can directly program the reports if you are familiar with the JavaScript and ARIS Script programming languages. The built-in script programming editor supports syntax highlighting and debugging of scripts you implemented.

The following table shows the capabilities of WYSIWYG editor and programming a script on your own.

The WYSIWYG editor assists you in creating template-based reports. It enables you to use report scripts that are included in the package. The editor is only an “output” tool. This means that it is not possible to edit models with it.

ARIS scripting is quite different as you can set values or add objects, for example. The WYSIWYG editor has the advantage that no programming knowledge is required to create a report script.

Creating reports with the WYSIWIG editor is recommended if you do not have any programming knowledge or simply want to create output without any further editing of data. Please note that if you manually change the script code of a report created with the WYSIWIG editor, you can’t alter this report in the WYSIWYG editor anymore.

There are already many examples available on ARIS Community how to create a script without using the WYSIWYG editor. In my next post, I will walk through an example to create a simple report using the WYSIWYG editor instead.