The design shortcoming is that

runReport

is a bit of a god method. It's clearly doing a bunch of different things (each comment denotes "a different thing"), which rather violates the Single Responsibility Principle, as well as probably the Open-closed Principle (ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SOLID). What it should be doing is breaking each of those out into separate methods. Why? Because if I was to be wanting to extend SimpleReporter to change some of its behaviour, then I need to override that entire method. Even though - in my case - all I really want to do is to override a method that might be called

prepareReport

(or something like that... I derived that from the comment in the code I pointed to above). All I want to do is to use a different .cfm file for the mark-up, eg:

// me.adamcameron.myApp.test.reports.SimpleReporter
component extends=testbox.system.reports.SimpleReporter {
    function prepareReport() {
        savecontent variable="local.report" {
            include "/some/different/path/here.cfm";
        }
        return local.report    
    }
}

All the config stuff the reporter does is spot-on for my requirements... I just need to tweak the output slightly. The general design advice that "if you are tempted to put a comment in your code to explain what happens next... then that next thing should be a function with a name that describes what the comment would be describing" exists for a reason.

once I have an alpha I will send it to you for feedback

I know how that feels

jumping from pond to pond

pull one thread, and get another thread