CAPE-OPEN

The Unit Operation interface specification includes an ICapeUnitReport interface that lets a Unit Operation be asked to provide a report to the PME, for example for inclusion in the general report that a PME is delivering to the Flowsheet User.
In the way it was designed this interface could in fact be implemented on any PMC (a Property Package, a Flowsheet Monitoring Component) but since this is not stated in the interface description, this was never done and anyway no PME would know about the presence of such an interface on a PMC which is not a Unit Operation.
This makes the case for having a common interface dedicated to reporting and available for implementation on any type of PMC.
The ICapeUnitReport interface may be seen as a bit limited in scope, especially with respect to the format of reports that can be provided by the PMC and taken care of by the PME. A kind of workaround was devised through the NamedValues feature of SimulationContext in order to let know to a Unit Operation that a PME accepts a format such as HTML. It seems necessary to get rid of this workaround and to include in a new Common interface specification on reporting a better coverage of the format issue.
The CO-LaN community has been asked to provide feedback on this proposal which is sketched above. Any views of necessary features of a Reporting Common interface are welcome through this forum.

Colan should define the format of XML report message.For example use the desciplines of Microsoft docx XML file, which could report as table, title, text pharagraph. All the report messages are normal XML strings, but Simulator could display them likes Microsoft Word.

Which DTD would you suggest would describe the XML?

Happy new year Jasper！

I suggest Colan defines one custom XML format, which is simple and has sufficient fucntions, likes the following:

<title1>1. Sample title</title1>

<title2> 1.1 Sample sub title </title2>

<paragraph> The sample texts. </paragraph>


<table>

<row>
<range>cell1 message</range> <range>cell2 message</range>
</row>

<row>
<range>cell1 message</range> <range>cell2 message</range>
</row>

</table>

Happy new year. So you are suggesting a sub-set to HTML, more or less. This gets complicated rather quickly (defining how paragraph data aligns, defining how images are inserted, etc). I fear that such a DTD is somewhat out of scope for CO-LaN, plus, all PMEs would have to come up with a renderer for such a format.

Don't to care text align, color, font size, font name problems, just simplest desciplines as I mentioned.

The simulator has it's own style to display them, for example the specified font, line space, color for title.

Complicated XML standards will make nobody to fill them.