Dev Log: May 14 Wrap-up

Overview

Today was one of those days where I spent as much time cleaning up and reverting as I did actually pushing new code. Focused mostly on the reporting engine—making data grouping a bit smarter and wrestling with how we handle dynamic logos in headers and footers.

What I Worked On

Refining the Report Grouping

I spent a good chunk of the morning working on our resource grouping logic. I needed a way to better identify how data gets bundled together before it hits the template, so I added a new grouping key attribute across the resource definitions.

Updating the reporting engine to actually recognize this new key took a few tries to get the mapping right, but it should make the report generation much more flexible for the end users. It’s one of those small changes that feels minor but fixes a ton of downstream logic headaches.

The Header and Footer Dance

I had a bit of a back-and-forth with dynamic logos today. Initially, I tried to split out the logic for headers and footers so we could pull different assets for each. I pushed it, realized something was off with how the paths were being resolved, and had to hit the panic button with a quick revert.

After a bit of head-scratching and local testing, I re-applied the fix. Now, instead of just grabbing a generic logo path, the engine actually distinguishes between the master header and the master footer. It’s much cleaner now, even if the path to get there was a bit winding.

Pruning the Dependency Tree

I noticed our Word generation logic was carrying around some pretty heavy baggage. I decided to strip out a bunch of legacy libraries that were just bloating the build. We’re moving in a different direction for document generation, so removing those old docx4j dependencies felt great. It’s always satisfying to see the dependency list get shorter rather than longer.

Wrapping Up

Overall, a productive day despite the minor setback with the logo logic. The reporting engine feels a bit more robust tonight than it did this morning. Tomorrow, I’m planning to dive deeper into the Word generation refactor now that the old libraries are out of the way.

Catch you later.