Amendments to the column class allow reports/entities to specify these
options for column instances, which are then passed to the aggregation
type when it is applied.
Due to Oracle re-factoring, we can improve the performance of date
aggregation by only executing the column supplied query once. We
can also improve the generated GROUP BY query to re-use the column
alias on supported DBs, rather than executing the aggregation again.
This allows each class to define the type of data that they return,
regardless of the type of column to which they are applied. This is the
pre-cursor to work on graphing and filtering of aggregated data.
E.g. a text field that is aggregated with "count" is returning numeric
data rather than text.
This change introduces updates to the existing aggregation API, to
allow types to define whether to group by fields of a column to which
the aggregation is applied.
The new date aggregation utilises this, to allow for creation of time
series reports, e.g. report data grouped by dates.
Co-authored-by: Daniel Neis Araujo <danielneis@gmail.com>
Paul Holden