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Reporting Functionality for Web Applications?
"It's not vital that the reports be printed from the client machine (as opposed to the servers), but that would be preferable, for flexibility. At the very least, the person initiating the reporting should be able to choose an appropriate network printer on the server's network, but ideally a client network printer would be better.
Of course it would be nice if the reports were relatively easy to build; I would prefer not to have to write a ton of source to gather and format data. I'd prefer not to have to write any, really. The kind of drag-and-drop report builders you get with something like Microsoft Access would be nice, although it's not a requirement.
First of all, what are the thoughts and solutions on this general problem space? What tools can I make use of to really do this kind of thing well in a web application space.
Secondly, considering that I'd prefer to make use of J2EE for the project, what are some of my options for integration with J2EE. It would be nice if the reporting software could integrate with the object model rather than the database, so that I could re-use business logic. Not necessarily critical, but definitely a nice-to-have feature."
Having faced a similar situation myself, I ended up using PDFlib. It's a nice high level API for generating PDFs on the fly. Now my clients can get printer quality reports generated for them dynamically off the web. I used it in conjunction with Perl. But it supports bindings to other languages (including Java) as well. It's not free, but it's quite affordable compared to most other PDF generation software out there.
Have a look at iText for generating pdf in a Java environment. It isn't going to give you the 'drag and drop' report building, but it seems to be one of the most capable pdf libraries for Java.
Definatly Crystap reports. I have used it for reporting off of text files , fox pro databases, SQL, custom databases, etc... Easy to use, lot of re-usuability for search and reporting functions, fully automated if you do it right, able to publish to web, on, and on , and on....... Hey, can you help me out and tell me if there is a program out there to copy files.
Welcome to our planet. You'll find the grass green, the sky blue and the clouds white n fluffy. Rainfall varies dependent on location and most of the natives are friendly. You'll find our reality a little different than what your use to, deal with it.
I hope you enjoy you stay on our little blue world.
You can implement two basic kinds of reports. Pre-generated report files, a link to which opens Crystal's web-based viewer(Java, ActiveX or HTML). and custom-data reports which allow you to modify the data displayed based on input from the web page (on-they-fly modification, replaccement of the SQL) as well as reports (the format of which) is generated on the fly. You can also (from the web) export(in just about any format you could want) and print. All formatting, etc. is preserved(when not using the HTML viewer).
And of course, Crystal Reports generation creation tool for Reports is very nice. better than any other I've seen and the only one useable by non-tech savvy people. Of course, if you're wedded to a *nix-based solution, you're pretty much left to code your own, and god forbid someone not of your programming staff needs to generate the report formatting.
What really scares me about this question is the request that the solution somehow use J2EE. The merits of J2EE aside this statement tells me that the person is more interested in finding a interesting problem for this exciting new solution that they have. This backassward approach to IT is what gets so many projects into trouble. The analogy is buying the biggest, baddest hammer in the world cause all of the market reports and trade publications say it is the best hammer to be had bar none, and then trying to assemble electronics with it. If you want to solve this problem 1) Define the problem 2) Select a possible solution 3) Examine the solution to see if it is reasonable in your enviroment 4) Repeat steps 2 and 3 as necessary 5) Confirm that the problem is still the same as before, if not repeat steps 1 - 5 6) Select an apporpriate technological solution to the problem 7) Confirm that the problem is still the same as before, repeats steps 1 - 7 if not 8) Implement the solution. 9 Confirm your implementation solves the problem that you originally were trying to solve. If not check to make sure that problem stil exists and if so, and you have not solved it repeat steps 1-8
Please read this post in Pakistani accent.
.gone?), you need to stick to your code monkeying skills, PDF format is documented very nicely by Adobe, its pretty straight forward. Write a C/C++ deamon that listens for messages on a queuing server and generates PDF files on the fly based on message queue parameters, records its activity in a table and listens to the queue again. This works for both interactive and batch mode operations, your servlets or cgi or php or perl scripts will look up the database for finsihed reports and their PDF locations on the file server, stream it over to the browser as is. As for queuing solution you can use MSMQ, MQSeries or even a home grown database base queueing engine which won't be asynchronous but will do the job if you create a thread that checks a queue table in a dbms every so often and does the trick.
:) To email me, remove potatoes from my address.
First of all, all of the solutions being mentioned here are useless if you need to genrate more than a few hundred pages per report. Apache FOP for instance explodes at 60-100 pages depending on content (Any bad xml/xsl transform tool will do that to you, its called running out of heap by way of using xsl on a huge xml document). If money is no object, I suggest you go for Actuate (http://www.actuate.com/) They have the best reporting server solution out there, it allows complete formatting control with a GUI builder, support for a VBScript like language in addition to Java and extremely neat control over data sources. From my experience extremely scalable too. I generate over 3 gigabytes of PDF reports every night for hundreds of clients in addition to an interactive report generation system that creates PDF output on the fly.
If money is an issue (what!! you cant afford a $80K/Processor 8 Processor recommended solution? what are you working for? a
Hope I helped you solve the problem
If not, give me a shout at optimizer@hotpotatoesmail.com and I will be happy to assist you.
You will need to be able to wire money to Pakistan
Faraz Babar
There was a company at linux world that had had a reporting tool that did just this. They were across from the Zeus booth and some remote windows access software company. Between them and the bordland pavallion. I forgot what they were called though, sorry. If i think of it, ill make another post.
Jeff Knox
Not to mention Oracle Reports.
I looked into this and for a small company actuate is way out of budget. Its been a while but I believe the cost was well over 10K per cpu. I just remember that purchasing that product would have cost more than the development of the rest of the project.
"What are the three words guaranteed to humiliate men everywhere?
In Republican America phones tap you.
If you don't mind throwing combatibility with pre-6 netscape browsers and pre-5 ie browsers out the window, it's quite possible.
Okay, I know I'm plugging my own resume, but I found that I could do CSS tricks with http://www.math.jhu.edu/~martind/resume.html to make certain that my resume printed just the way I wanted it to from ie 5.x browsers (which were the most common in the HR departments I was targetting). Remember that a resume's purpose is to get you past the HR drones; they will either print it out and hand (or fax) it to the person who'd you would actually be working for, or ignore it entirely. In a few very rare cases, I've seen HR departments clued enough to send resumes as email attachments, but not before first converting them to Word and trashing all the formatting anyway. Therefore, ie5-specific CSS in a resume isn't that big a deal.
Not only that, but it wasn't hard to include the necessary extra xml-foo so that office 2000 would load the html as a word doc. with all the borders, etc. set correctly. This made keeping the html, pdf, plain text, and doc formats of my resume in sync quite easy - I'd update the html from anywhere, and use lynx -dump to give me the plain text. I'd then walk over to a windows machine that had the full office 2000 suite on it, and load that page up in ie5. Print to file from ie5 to generate postscript, and also load up http://math.jhu.edu/~martind/resume2k.doc in Word (that file's just a symbolic link to the html). Save the Word doc. in office 95 format and ftp/scp the postscript and '95 doc format back to the server. Then use ps2pdf on the server to turn the postscript version into pdf.
It got a bit more complicated than that for a while - inserting pdfmark stuff into the postscript so that hyperlinks worked in the pdf file - but basically, that's it. (Maintenance of the multiple separate versions has lagged since I landed a job back in August - I only generated the most recent files a few months ago to get recruiters off my back)
This tool can generate report in html, text, pdf, excel, rtf and other formats. I use it for a big intranet project and it works perfectly.
Welcome to MY planet, jackass. The trees on my planet sink CO2, produce O2, provide habitat directly or indirectly for most known land animal species, hold the soil in place, and generally keep the ecosystem humming along. Chopping them up for reports about some business, which will have no lasting value for humanity, is not an appropriate use of trees.
I'd like to see the numbers on it, since you are interested. How much fuel is required to haul a tree to the paper mill? Produce the paper? Ship the paper to retail and the to the customer? Then what, is the above poster going to pay fedex to burn massive amounts of jet fuel to overnight the precious report somewhere?
This useless waste of energy has to stop. Check out today's SF Chronicle: Californians use 15 megawatts of power just to stir the water in their fucking swimming pools. WHAT THE FUCK ARE WE DOING WASTING SO MUCH ENERGY?!?!
Anyway my personal opinion is that HTML is wrong wrong wrong for this stuff. Generate TeX output and convert to postscript, or *roff, or generate postscript directly. If the target is dead trees you should use dead-tree-era technology.
Fortunately, and it seems you don't quite realize this, trees are an incredibly renewable resource. We're not going to run out anytime soon...
Only on slashdot can a posting be rated "Score -1, Insightful".
We use the output buffering feature available in PHP 4 and pdfLaTeX for this Task (especially the LaTeX longtable style).
...
It is not to fast (~1-2 pages a second),
but for reports this should be fast enught IMHO.
Documentation on this is right now only available in German, but if you push me hard enough i'll translate it
Granted, you'll have to write a renderer. However, HTML does not have enough expressiveness to deal with page break situations, and other complications of paged printing anyhow.
PHP 4 does include PDF functions.
http://www.php.net/manual/en/ref.pdf.php
Or, its seems that people always forget that you can write postscript files by hand. : )
Know what I like about atheists? I've yet to meet one that believes God is on their side.
Try http://www.jinfonet.com/
I had a similar requirement about 18 months ago. I checked out Jinfonet and it seemed pretty nice. I had no budget so I instead used PHP, and LaTeX and some TeX to PDF converter. It was nice since I could offer the option to output to a printer, view a couple pages in HTML, view the whole thing in PDF or export to CSV. I used the largetable macro in LaTeX I think. The output was quite nice but I didn't have time to mess with formatting very much. It wouldn't have been too hard to create several templates. Now I'm stuck with an NT system using Crystal Reports. It's quite nice to design in but not as fast or fun as before.
A php script can read files on the server (or submitted by the client,) massage them into the appropriate format.
If you use XML you can really go to town on the data, and ignore what you don't need, generate a PDF (or HTML with XSLT but that's less transportable and controling page formatting is more explicit [you'll have to do that work yourself.])
The client web browser can then load the HTML or the PDF and use Acrobat to view & print to their heart's content.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Actually, I'm a federal government employee. The only reason people want to spit out gobs of paper is to *prevent* people from attempting to read it. For that, you hardly need to produce actual reports - and especially not pretty ones (the more bland and boring, the better for that purpose). While it might promote job security, it's a lousy way to actually accomplish anything, though.
There are a few solutions out there for generating web-viewable reports but I don't particularly like them (Crystal reports has caused a number of headaches around here in particular).
You need fonts and page breaks? Just about anything other than raw text can do that (yes, even HTML). I use HTML/CSS for all my reports (ranging from crosstabs to listings to canned documents) - how you generate it is wide open.
Hundreds of pages worth of reports at once? If your reports are that large, you probably don't even want to deliver it to a browser. Some sort of server-side report queue would seem to be in order (ie the user requests a report and if they need to download a copy they come back and pick it up later when it's done). If you're printing from the server, just pick and choose your tech.
Drag-and-drop? Well, I far prefer building reports in HTML than in something like Crystal (which is what Access uses, by the way) - I hate mucking around with field alignments/sizes etc. I find that things go a lot quicker for me with HTML (CSS helps tremendously).
I'd really recommend reviewing your requirements. Is *anybody* really going to read hundreds of pages of reports? Perhaps you should be building a more flexible query tool so that your users can get the specific data they want without having to wade through mammoth wads of paper?
I have a handy library that can convert XML documents to HTML, text, Postscript, and PDF including inline PHP and data processing. Currently is implemented in PHP and I'm trying to port it to Python too. Is currently functional and I'm working on a newer version that is easier to extend. :)
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
XML is definitely the way to go. The XSLT stylesheets that you could generate can take you very far. Make sure you look into XSL:FO.
In particular, take a look at the XML Apache Project's FOP.
FOP, which is written in Java, will transform your XML data into PDF format.
open source and very nice
www.reportlab.com
Check the demos.
Really, it's cool
I appreciate your zeal to blast everyone into the 21st century, but there are still many entities that cannot think outside of the "dead trees in a metal box" box.
Who, you ask? Dealing substantially with the public sector, I would have to say government agencies. They still view computers as a way to streamline form and report generation, provided that they even use computers at all. To boot, government is just now getting the "it's gotta be on the web" bug. Their bottom line is "...and if it doesn't come in triplicate so that I can stuff it into a filing cabinet, I can't use it."
Then use hemp paper. Tree based paper has been around for less than a hundred years.
The company I interned at last summer, Dynalivery, focuses on web based reporting. Their main product is an enhancement to crystal reports called parallel crystal which makes it into a "web application." Not sure if their product is exactly what you're looking for, and I need to study for finals instead of actually reading your slashdot post fully, but I thought I'd suggest it.
Good luck,
Mike Hunter
Slashdot 's editors are dickheads
As far as I know, you cannot control page breaks via HTML inside a web browser.
You can kind of cheat with table row counts and style codes. In plain English, if the number of rows so far is greater than, say, 50, put in STYLE=page-break-before:always. v4 & above browsers honor it, if I remember right.
What's your damage, Heather?
Computers are everywhere; if your office is set up reasonably well
Oh, I wish. We have a similar setup to what the original poster has: we have to generate huge reports for our clients, most of which aren't able to get high-speed internet access. (We scan comment cards for hotels, restaurants, etc.) They want consolidated reports with color graphs explaining their customer satisfaction trends. We make all of the reports available on the internet, but people just don't want to see them that way. They don't have the time to download 100 pages worth of reports with color graphs over a 33.6.
What's your damage, Heather?
I've got a group in-house that does almost exactly what you're talking about. There's a lot of people on here spewing off about Crystal and PDF's, so let me give you more details on what worked for us.
We have a few large (2-5gb) databases that we have to report on. Most reports are generated on a periodic basis, but we've got a few that have to be done on-the-fly when the user requests them. The formatting has to be flawless, and we print out reports on color lasers as well as make them available for download.
The solution (picked long before I came on board) was Crystal Reports. Whether you like Windows-based development tools or not, you have to admit that it's easier to hire a Crystal person off the street than it is to hire & train for any other report writer.
To give you some idea, we have a dedicated Crystal person on staff, and several machines that churn out Crystal Reports full time. (We keep five Tektronix color lasers busy for most of the day.)
The same Crystal Report files are used whether the report is going online or being printed. In fact, we print to PDF format, and save the PDF's. Before you get one of our report packets in the mail (or FedEx or whatever), you can view the same report online in your web browser, and it prints out perfectly. Plus, there's no CPU/database load on our servers - each report is run once, and stored on hard drive.
For the reports that are done on-the-fly, we use the Crystal Reports viewers. There's several, a Netscape plugin, ActiveX plugin, and a Java plugin. You have to redirect your web users to the right page for your browser, of course. But for these on-the-fly reports, PDF isn't involved. They can print using the Crystal plugin, and page breaks and everything work fine.
I understand why a lot of people on here throw out solutions like XML, but my experience has been that spending more money on the famously well-used tool usually means spending a little less money on the hiring end later. When this becomes a big business (and aren't you planning for that?) you want to be able to hire quickly, and nothing's more widely used than Crystal Reports.
If you've got any questions about the setup, you can e-mail me.
What's your damage, Heather?
Right before I left my last gig which was generating financial reports in html, I pointed the folks towards the Spreadsheet::WriteExcel module.
The clients had been used to getting Excel formatted reports for years, and many of the reports needed colors. This let them dynamically do all that from a web page, but still have excel to manipulate the data. May not be what you were looking for, but it was pretty neat. Plus the output from WriteExcel looks great in Gnumeric as well.
There is no silver bullet. Plus, werewolves make better neighbors than zombies or vampires anyway.
Use Python and the PIDDLE graphics API. It can write very easily to PDF files, and it has nifty compression so an average page is around 1k - that makes 100-page documents reasonable. Furthermore, if you want to print to a network printer, you just change one parameter in PIDDLE and it will output PostScript instead of PDF, which you can then send to the nearest network printer. You can get the raw data using any of Python's numerous database APIs.
I've done some very impressive stuff using this combination, and Python is so easy to learn it hardly feels like programming.
I've used text based reports in a variety of enviornments, with, and without ReportGenerators in the sequence and straight text is always flexable. You can readily convert it to a format which is what the end users want. (PDF is very nice for 'laser like' output. It looks exactly like it will print. The viewer is easily integrated into the browser, and the viewer is free. (major bonus if the website is publicly accessable).
If you use Python, you might want to have a look at ReportLab, a nice open-source PDF generation library.
Printing from a webapplication can be a problem. At least it was for me; I failed to find a reasonable way to print from MSIE without the stupid page headers. Another problem is that you cannot predict anything about the formatting on the server-side (unless it's plain text). So you will most likely need a client-side application (or print from the webserver).
I solved part of this problem by creating a new MIME-type for the page to print and then create a DOS-app which does `type %1 > lpt1:' which I associated with the MIME-type/extension.
This is not a very good solution. Maybe someone has expierience with this? Is it possible to use a Java-applet or something like that?
0x or or snor perron?!
you might want to look into a latex/php/xxsql combo. you could construct a template like class file and then yank the info out of a database run latex on it, convert the output to postscript and dump it to a printer. the interface could be done in php. using java you could setup some type of drag and drop thing to tell it what format the data should be in. it would take quit a bit of work, though
use LaTeX? want an online reference manager that
-- john
So you think Slashdot needs a database of answers to questions which have easy answers?
I think questions that could very easily be solved with a mild application of google don't belong here.
For WebObjects I'd say the prefered solution is ReportMill. It's what we're using...
(For what it's worth, WO 5.0 (due any time) is supposed to be Java only)
I have used Crystal Info (now Seagate) a fair amount and it is a nice reporting platform. It requires an NT server to run on, but it allows you to schedule reports, balance reporting over multiple servers, design reports easily, build cubes, etc.
It can use many data sources, including flat files, web server logs are catered for, Exchange mailboxes, as well as the usual ODBC.
It has a web interface which allows you to view reports, it can e-mail reports to users, you can set up security on reports, it can produce reports in HTML and Word format too.
They even gave away a 50 user license of version 7 for free. Not sure if it's still available, but if you can find a copy of their free CDROM you'd be set.
There are many solutions out there to do web based reporting - from homebrew to megabuck applications. Here is one of latter:
Actuate's e.Reporting Suite
This system is something the company I currently work for is using for reporting. It consists mainly of three parts:
1) The report server
2) The development IDE (Workbench)
3) The report viewer
The report server is what actually runs the report - it interfaces with the web server you aare using to parse reporting requests, then runs the report, builds a DHTML page with the report result, and sends it back through the web server to be delivered to the client. The reports can be downloaded/printed by the client as PDF files (we are working on a way of making it a single step process - harder than it sounds). In some way it is possible to print from the server to a networked printer (this is an area I am not too familiar with).
The development IDE is where you create the reports - you can use simple wizard functions to create "ad-hoc" type reports relatively quickly, then you can flesh them out further with code (using a customized form of VB script), to allow a ton of functionality, from simple linking/drill down reporting, to custom reports that change depending on what data is wanted (I have created reports using it that look the same, but I didn't want to write two seperate reports, so I made one report that changes based upon a parameter passed into the report from the input form/URL). The IDE is drag-and-drop simplicity, very much like developing under VB (it is like VB for reporting) - drag text controls, size them, set properties, double-click and add custom code, then compile and run!
Finally, the report viewer is an application that allows the running of the reports without using a server - it is basically a desktop based viewer.
The downsides to all of this? Windows-based, and expensive. But overall I think it is a great product - it is almost possible to create a website based on nothing but reports. One could do the same using PERL or Python, or some other language (like Java, even C/C++) - but the ease of creation won't be there, and you won't have the "same-on-paper-as-on-screen" type print capability, either.
The one thing I don't get - why the need to print to paper? Why not just regenerate the report when you need to view it?
Worldcom - Generation Duh!
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
Parallel Crystal picks up where Crystal Reports starts having problems. Since you've already invested effort into building reports through Crystal, Parallel Crystal would be a great way to improve your reporting performance.
www.dynalivery.com
If you're not averse to having one component of your solution running on NT or 2000, and need this for a big n-tier solution, consider Parallel Crystal. It uses Crystal Reports to design the reports, then runs them on a scalable report server which integrates into a Java web application server. Output can be to a number of formats, including PDF.
I have done the same thing, but I would really like to be able to have better pagination options than those provided in HTML.
.e.
I would LOVE to be able to take my XML datasets, and convert them using XSLT into a PDF somehow.
anyone know how?
www.perceive.net
People see the world as they are, not as it is.
Gee, it sounds like you could use a Practical Extraction & Reporting Language. Eh?
DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL
If you happen to be using WebObjects, then ReportMill is an excellent solution. They are working on a non-WebObjects version.
So until there are some better, lighter, and more eye-friendly solutions to reading through computers, paper will still have a place in and out of the workplace.
"Sweet creeping zombie Jesus!"
I had good results with a similar problem using:
tbl -> groff -> acrobat distiller
As old as it is, tbl still produces very nice
looking output, and is very easy to generate.
As of SAS 8 (possibly before that even) the Output Delivery System (ODS) has supported HTML output. Since one of the main things that SAS does (it's a statistical analysis language) is in fact create reports it does this quite well I think. You'll have some disagree but as far as I've been able to tell the only language people like is the one they program in. So you might want to check out SAS. I've had quite a bit of luck with it. The URL is http://www.sas.com or you want to click http://www.sas.com. You can also contact me via my webpage if you want some more info on it since I (and my employer) consider myself to be good at it.
We have found that Java and the J2EE work great for web apps that also need to have these types of reporting functions. Check out iText - a JAVA-PDF Library for the api that will make a pdf from your data.
www.reportmill.com
Our company does that, except they are all in house applications. I could tell you how to do we do it, but then I'd have to kill you.
Oh god, you know too much already.
~@#$F~-connection terminated
I have to second this. If you are comfortable coding in HTML, and simply want the typographical and page control that lacks in browsers, HTMLDOC is a brain-dead easy way to generate consistant PDF files from HTML. I use it a fair bit myself, and appreciate it's directness.
I see a lot of comments which mention Crystal Reports. I've got it installed on my computer, but every attempt to use it has left me frustrated. It is a truely evil piece of software. R&R is far easier to learn in my opinion, and there has been very little I haven't been able to do with it, and I don't think Crystal Reports would have helped in those situations either. Being able to create an informative, professional looking report quickly is very valuable and I don't think the added complexity of Crystal Reports is beneficial.
Check out AbiWord.
PDFlib is a good thing. Better than the lack of page breaks in HTML.
Here's a good demonstration of it: Paper CD Case. Make paper cases of you CDs. Enter details, it makes you a PDF.
Hey moderators! My post is off-topic. Do something about it!
http://www.easysw.com/htmldoc/
Easy, lightweight, quick HTML -> PDF .
mt
Roxen, with it's business graphics module, is capable of generating fancy graphs and reports from any arbirary data source, on the fly.
Very cool and easy to use. Roxen is available at http://www.roxen.com
-- CKM
internet systems architect - scalability - commerce
-- I don't have a cool sig.
jade(xml) to pdf
ipp(pdf) to printer(remote or local)
Most of your network printers have or are adding IPP and PDF capability, though I'm sure you could just as easily translate your document to PostScript. Fonts shouldn't be a problem, just use the ones on your printer. PDF is handy because you can also kick it around a lot more easily than other document formats, although it does have the problem of being mostly write-only.
Just some thoughts. Hope they help.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Hi slashdot! My boss has asked me to write an extension to our defect tracking system in Perl. Please e-mail me the code for this before 5 PM pst so I can make it home in time to catch The Simpsons.
Please, no confusing external libraries other than CGI.pm or Win32 ODBC. Oh, I heard that printf is gay, so please don't use them.
Thank you!
A lot of people are saying that Crystal is the goods. I would like to add that in addition to having decent tech support, the hold music system is without a doubt the best I've ever experienced. You dial in, pick your favorite music genre out of four or five, and listen to some pretty decent examples of those genres while waiting.
take a look at the Actuate web reporting. I work for a software development company, that uses both Actuate and Corvu as 3rd party reporting solutions. Acuate by far has some awesome web capabilities. It's a very sophisticated product, and will probably require some consulting to get it up and running. Once it's up, though, it is a very simple tool for generating complex reports
Our clients needed central control of the database and reporting, so we wrote a report generator. Our PHP System includes tools ror administering your database (the data side, not the DBA side) so anyone with a browser (and obviously a valid password) can do it. We wrote a report generator that you enter the SQL, it generates the report. If you want it printable, you click on the "export to excel" option, and it loads the thing up in Excel (gotta use IE for our admin, Netscape's busted CSS/DHTML support screws it, and Netscape 6/Mozilla isn't there yet), and they can print. As an added advantage, the Excel format is trivial.
Excel can read tables, you just set the content type. If you need fancy formating, plug it into the PHP source.
If you don't want to code, there are dozens of programming shops that will develop a system for you for a reasonable fee.
You don't want to spend money or effort? Well, you're in trouble. Labor isn't free. Do it in house or hire someone. Some of our baselevel systems (including our DB class, which can help you abstract your DB from the engine, you'd need to write your own if you aren't using Postgres or MySQL) are available on our website. If you want to hire us, e-mail myself or sales@feratech.com.
Alex
Regardless of the program you use, try to store the data in XML format. Why? Because then you can use one XSLT for conversion to HTML for web use, another XSLT for conversion to PostScript for printing, another XSLT for conversion to Excel spreadsheets -- you get the idea. While I hate to say so on this site, SQL Server 2000 offers some particularly nice functionality that can be used to implement this -- such as automatic transformation of tables to XML documents.
If you require graphics as well as text, check out the gd graphics library. The Webalizer is an absolutely delicious example of how gd can be used to create slick PDF graphs on the fly.
You mention that you'd like to integrate with J2EE... I'm somewhat of a Java guru and can say without wavering that Java is not a first-choice solution for text-based reporting. If your reports are being generated by a Perl or PL/SQL script and you're just outputting the results from Java, it's fine ;), but text processing and transformation isn't too hot in the standard Java APIs. Now if you want to pay for a third-party API, you may be able to get around this...
For graphical reporting, however, Java is one of the best solutions. There are a plethora of Java charting tools available, although the decent ones will cost some dough...
Anyhoo, if you provide some more details on your specific task I can give a better recommendation.
--
--
I like to watch.
Simply brute force handcoding individual reports in Java, Perl, PHP, Python, Lisp, etc. can be done, but is very time consuming.
An extremely detailed report (with subreports, aggregates on multiple levels, etc) can be generated (by someone who knows what they are doing) in Crystal Reports or MS Access and integrated into a reporting framework that handles all your filtering, interface, etc in about 15 minutes, or less. How quickly can this be done with web interface (and the Crystal web deployment is not a valid solution, because it doesn't scale.)
If profit and efficiency is a concern (which I'm sure it is for his manager, not sure about you though; Efficiency, yes, profit....well....), then I think he is asking a very valid question. I have been searching the internet extensively the last couple of days for an application that will allow you to easily design and serve up internet based reports, but I have not found a single product that even attempts to reproduce the functionality of the multitude of client server report writers on the market.
And to all of the people who say "why don't you do your homework before you ask questions with obvious answers", you might want to read some of the postings from the helpful and knowledgeable people here, I know I've learned of a few products that I was unable to find in Google.
PERIOD.
HTML never was and never will be a content description language intended to be printed.
There are tons of good interfaces to PDF and postcript for Java. I would say PDF all the way. It is more of a pain to get the reports right. But the tradeoff is a printable medium that actually works properly.
Call me crazy but I have dealt with some really high volume, high end situations where HTML just doesnt cut it when you have to generate reports for big wigs at a comapny. Sorry, its not always easy.
Jeremy
Go figure, no one wants to develop for winblows, so they have to charge for it.
There is very little future in being right when your boss is wrong.
At the risk of (-1, Redundant), I'm using Crystal Reports to do Web-based reporting of Process Control Data. It takes some getting used to, but the learning curve flattens out pretty fast. The reports are near-perfect replicas of our old paper forms, and look so much cleaner (partially due to not being 27th-generation Xeroxes.) The web versions are also paper-accurate.
Only downside? You have to configure your web server for it, use ActiveX, use the slower and slightly less featurefull Java Version, use the much slower and much less featurefull HTML version, or a combination of the above. Not pretty.
Hopefully this is enough info for you to evaluate it.
I think you might want to think about accessing the data as XML and using XSL:FO as an output format. You can use Apache FOP to generate PDF's from XSL:FO documents. There's also a commercial offering that does the same thing, can't remember the name offhand though.
I have worked with both Business Objects and Cognos as an application architect and as an administrator and I can say without a doubt that Cognos kicks BI's ass all over the place. Cognos was designed WELL. It is scalable, configurable, stable, and it sets up fast. BI has the most bass-ackwards clustering I have seen, Is tempermantal at best, and only fully supports NT. (I don't know if that's an issue for you or not). I must admit that I haven't done a large amount of work with either one as a user (like many people here, I don't use that type of tool for data analisys... but then most programmers/admins don't) so I can't speak to it being easy to use or effective. I will say that considering your requirements I would NOT use Crystal Reports. It certainly does NOT seem like it would fit your needs. For what you are describing you need Business Objects or Cognos, and I would easily reccomend Cognos.
Politics, Culture, Food?
The lesson we learned - if you need to handle complex reports and heavy loads, you must custom code them.
Finally someone who gets it. All reporting tools work nicely on small sets of data with simple relations. When a database gets to a certain level of complexity reporting is difficult - no matter which tool you use.
Our Clients have BIG databases with complex relationships in the data. Typically they have hundreds of different reports that has to be created dynamically and gets accessed simultaneously by a lot of users. Try hard coding all that in perl.
Over a few years we (i.e. the company I work for) has developed our own reporting tool that can generate (amongst other things) HTML. It's big, it's slow and difficult to use. On numerous occasions management has suggested we use some other reporting tool. It always starts of great - "Wow look at this report I did in five minutes!". But then as soon as you want to do something more complex it's either impossible or just as difficult as with our tool.
Reporting is a difficult thing and it will probably stay that way for a long time.
siener's youtube channel
Those invoices were beautiful thanks to Donald Knuth...
It has to be said that I was using fairly advanced features to make the invoices perfect, but it still took less than a day to design all the forms. LaTeX's supertabular environment rocks and is well worth learning.
pathologically eclectic rubbish lister?
cat
There are lots of perfectly good windows reporting tools and if you dont want to have to do any work yourself - GO BUY ONE!
I'm as much in favour of linux (and uk spelling) as the next guy but to be fair windows has better tools for this sort of thing.
If you want to go down the linux root then I suggest using perl or php to create a pdf file which the client could then print. It'll require a fair chunk of effort on ur part but the final solution will be infinitely more controllable than it would be on a drag and drop windows system.
We have many clients that paper reports for many reasons. In this case, it is what the client wants, not what you want, that is important!
Many people can't see the monitor very well, or it gives them a headache (either vision trouble, or having bi-trifocles, etc. can cause this.) Personally, a monitor gives me a headache after a while. This means I have to print out pages that need extra careful study and look at them on the printed page.
First, with VB, you can use ADO to do all the database work. An ADO recordset has support for paging, so you can easily separate your report into pages. It has an easy to use Printer object(which seems to be there by default, I didn't have to declare an object). At the end of each page, all you have to do is call Printer.Print and Printer.NewPage. At the end of your document, call Printer.EndDoc. Presto. A paginated database report, with no external(read: $$$) component. You can further refine your report by setting fonts, etc, but the above outlines the basics.
Another cool thing about VB is that you can drag a WebBrowser control onto your form to make an instant browser. You can then host your web based app in this form. The only reason I recommend doing the printing with VB instead of the web based app is that you generally have to display everything you print if you do it all on the web page, whereas VB you can print things without necessarily displaying them.
I'm hoping Mozilla has the same functionality, as I've done this, with the majority of the application logic in the (cross-platform) web app, using VB only to display the application and to print. If Mozilla has the same functionality, I'll have a powerful application that is cross-platform and updateable without needing to send clients install programs.
No, Thursday's out. How about never - is never good for you?
I'm surprised something like this got through. Its kinda like asking 'I'm looking for a way to share files between my multiple machines, and I don't want to use floppy disks any more."
/. is a commercial entity. goto slashdot.com
Cognos has every single feature you are describing and then some. It is a very solid product but it does have a price. Can you build something like it for the price I hardly think so.
Got Code?
Crystal Reports can be integrated into your application itself as well and features a killer report designer and query builder interface and great printed reports. Crystal Reports can publish report datastraight to the web as well. For more information, check out Seagate's web site.
Business Objects is very popular for its interactive report functionality, where you can drill down into your query getting different levels of information. It helps you avoid information overload in large reports and is generally the tool of choice for doing crossreporting on related queries. For more information, check out Business Object's web site.
-Pat
The only thing I know of that even comes close is FOP (XSL Formatting Objects Processor). FO is an XML-based formatting language that can be used to generate PDF files as well as printable output. You have complete control over page breaks and static content such as report headers and footers.
You will need to use Java (FOP is Java-based), and if the reports are generated on the client, you will need to download about 2.5MB of JAR files to the client for the required libraries. If you use Java servlets, you can generate the reports on the server and save on the size of the download and the processing needed at the client.
Do it all in Java, server-side, with three Apache tools - Xerces, Xalan, and Fop.
Generate your data in XML format, use XSL with Xalan to produce formatting objects which Fop can then turn into PDFs and deliver to the user. Reports exactly as you want them. That's the way we're doing it, anyway.
Ok, I'm just finishing up a project with about 300 reports that are launched (mostly) from web-based Oracle Forms apps. I don't know if this would work for you, but I'll try to explain briefly how my system works. I'm using Brio.Report for the report engine (I've got a few COBOL reports but they run through a Brio wrapper I wrote). Brio.Report (aka SQR) will generate output in XML, HTML, PDF, PS, PCL, and plain ASCII, as well as its own intermediate format. In my system, when the report is run it saves the intermediate .spf file in a temporary directory, and then generates an HTML version from the ASCII output, since I didn't like their default HTML. There's no way to control page breaks in HTML, so I cheated - my script looks at the browser you're using and tries to guess how many lines per page it prints, and then pads the -formatted output with enough blank lines to make the page breaks line up. It works pretty well most of the time. But more importantly, the user has the option of clicking on a PDF icon and having the script generate a PDF from the .spf file.
Brio.Report's got a spiffy-looking GUI design tool, but I honestly haven't used it much. All of my existing reports were written for SQR 3.0 on a VAX so I didn't need to worry about design too much. Amazingly, most of them ran with very minimal modifications.
It seems to be build for batch processing - it's quite happy churning out hundreds of reports at a time. The ActiveX control included with it sucks, though - I wound up writing my own wrapper for it in VB to integrate more easily with IIS. (No flames, please - I have to use what I'm given.) It's certainly capable of generating nicer-looking output than what I'm doing, with GIF and JPEG graphics and such, but appearance isn't my primary concern right now and I don't have time to mess with it.
On the down side, it's not cheap. I believe they license it by server class - on a midrange NT box I think we paid around $10K, and about $15K on an Alpha running OpenVMS. So if this is for home use, you're probably out of luck.
Hope that helps....
Just a quick aside, there is also the matter of just how page breaks are generated. These are usually part of the printer driver, and there hooks in the word processor, etc for trigger the printer driver code. This was never set up, as far as I know, in HTML. This is a capability that would have to be intergrated via a plugin or something into the browser itself. Now add this to multiple browsers, etc. and you have lots of problems.
I supposed you could generate an activex thing to generate a page break that would get auto loaded into IE, and have it fire when there is a specific tag such as [pgbrk] or similar.
You would also have to integrate specified type sizes so that it still prints correctly even if the user has the parameter to view the browser type set to extra large.
So that is another angle, because then you could set up custom reports using JDBC, Interdev, or similar to pull info from the database. You would just need to generate something that would create a custom tag for the web page
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Now there are a number of products where you could generate a report for a database with HTML tags inserted in the correct local, then print to a text file. snd a separate one for printing. This essentially generates HTML pages for you as you need. All it becomes is a specialized report, that can be uploaded as needed.
So the best option is to have a report that is generated for web display, and have a second one for download in PDF or whatever for printing.
Let's face it, depending on the database, custom reports etc have been where a lot of database analysts and programmers have made the big bucks for a very long time. While you can get away wit simple reports in something like ms access, in the long run your are going to have to get someone who has the knowledge and experience to put it together right.
When I used to do tech support for a consumer database company, I ran into this all the time - Customers wanting to do sometimes complicated things with only a minute or two of effort. Add in some anomolies because the database was not normalised correctly, and you get a bloody mess. It was not so much the system, as it was getting the query right (Alphabetized by state, then town, then family name, and filtering those custers using master card for purchase over 250$ during the month of december, and who still owe us money as of the end of the preceding month)
Depending on the setup, the query could be trivial or a nuisance.
In some cases, you can't get there from here.
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
I'm a *nix man myself, but we live in an MS world. Sometimes you just have to deal. and if this person is in an office where the clients are ActiveX machines, then that's what they should use.
if it has to be more cross-platform, the Java isn't abad idea as swing renders relatively quickly, though the applet might be a bit slow to load INITIALLY...
-----
Oracle Discoverer 3i
BRIO
StatServer (based on Splus)
Build your own.
The preferred one depends on scope... it sounds like you want BRIO. Easy report building (drag-and drop), fast data access (client-server), uses an IE Plugin that intalls itself (dunno about mozilla, etc) so the printing situation is pretty easy. Great functionality... I really like it. But it's not perfect, but it's probably fine if you're just reporting already stored data in the DB.
Stay away from Discoverer because it's not that useful and really just gets in the way... at least where I work. There are some nice business-reporting things in there like drill-downs etc... it does have the oracle functions available, and the easy query building, but bad charting.
Statserver is really useful for things that require alot of data-fitting and modelling... post-processing based on live-data, etc. Based on Splus... the S is for statistics I think (truly remarkable system, the Open Source version is called R, even better in many ways). It's web-based and connects to other db's behind the scenes.
Rolling your own can be the most fun... we did that before at my last place when none of the options above were flexible enough...
I dunno about cost, but BRIO is very well designed.
"The pure and simple truth is rarely pure and never simple." -Oscar Wilde
How did I do all this? I READ A FUCKING BOOK! Well, a bunch of them. I am the author of a large intranet and a growing extranet and all it takes is imagination and the willingness to dive in...
To moderators with an anti-M$ bias, grow up. Their tools are powerfull and easy.
No, I dn't think you can control page breaks in HTML. Besides, if the reports are long, printing them through the web browser isn't ideal. I'd be looking at integrating with reporting software or, alternately, doing something like PDF generation.
As for those people who felt I should have 'done my research', this one of the avenues in which I was doing just that, and given the level of response, it was worth a few flames and trolls to get a mass of cogent thoughts and recommendations.
First of all, Crystal Reports sucks ;-) (had experience).
Second. I developed a project very similar to what this guy is asking about. And in Java as well. Ipulled the data in XML and used XSL-FO project (see http://xml.apache.org/ to process it into PDF which is your best bet for online reports. It worked out prety well.
...remember good 'ol times when IP used to mean Internet Protocol....
I've never used it but I had to look at it once. Price drove us away for our relatively small project but from what I remember it was very flexible and powerful. I'm sure plenty of people out here have had experience with it, good or bad.
? We use IE at work, but that works for us. Our warehouse gets all of their reports in HTML, and I use that for page breaks.
See:
www.microstrategy.com
They have a demo here:
http://demo.microstrategy.com/
There are ways to fake it by using images that are roughly the size of one printed page (browsers usually won't print images across two pages).
But since you're looking for a ready made software package, the odds they've incorporated something like that seem slim.
I also have implemented a reporting solution using Java/XML/XSL-T. We move and store data using XML, and when it comes to reporting we just using XSL-T to transform to HTML and display in the user's browser. Good for short reports (a few weeks), and for longer we simply do the transformation offline and save the HTML. As for XML->PDF, this exists, it's called FOP. Go to xml.apache.org and check it out. It will do everything you want and more than anyone possibly needs :)
take your sig and shove it
For quite a while now, I've been trying to find a solution to this problem myself. Finally I had to settle on writing my own Latex generator. I'm in the early stages but it looks like it will work well. If all pans out I should be able to create report templates in Lyx (with some manual modifications) and IBM has a relatively inexpensive ($20-40?) Latex browser plug-in, if a normal viewer isn't acceptable. The reports are generated by the server and then passed to the client, so client printing is not a problem. Just wish I had more time and resources to get it completed!
:T:R:A:N:S:
Cocoon has many of the features you describe. It doesn't have drag and drop report creation, you are on your own there. What it does provide, however, is a solid foundation for creating different views of a data set in different presentation languages. You can build a report from some input XML data as an HTML web page, or as a PDF document with line breaks, etc. It also encourages very clean implementation by total separation of content / logic and presentation code.
For a good overview of what Cocoon can do, including PDF output, check out my resume.
Well, your fingers weave quick minarets; Speak in secret alphabets;
std::disclaimer<std::legalese> sig=new std::disclaimer; sig->dump(); delete sig;
Use PHP to generate an .rtf file with the pagebreak tags therein. Specs are available on-line.
On your browser, use the link save-as feature to save the file as an .rtf and open it in WP or some other word processor.
Score! I finally found a question I could answer!
I am currently implementing code to meet the same specs as the poster. There are a lot of canned solutions that rely on a SQL backend, e.g. Crystal Reports makes a web based solution. In my case I decided to use XML and XSL. The basic idea is to generate XML from whatever DB or data source you are using and then transform it to HTML using an XSL tranformation. The actualt transform can be done on the server or client. I prefer server side processing since this reduces the need for an XML compatible browser. The nice thing about this solution is you can totally reformat reports by changing the stylesheet, not a line of program code needs to be changed. Also, you can provide hyperlinks to the raw XML so the user can format the reports using his own XSL, or import the XML to any app that has ASCII import. We use Windows 2000, IIS & SQL Server, which have fantastic facilities for XML processing.
I've had success with pdflatex for PDF generation from .tex files created by BRL. This is a text-based solution rather than the drag/drop you wanted, but I consider that a feature, not a bug, having spent a year doing PowerBuilder datawindows. I'd much rather insert some text where a new column should go rather than have to drag existing columns/headers to the left and the right.
I have a printout of our inter-office phone directory (database-generated with BRL/LaTeX) up on my wall because, although I type fast, my fingers are slower than my eyes for finding a specific name.
Printed reports are also useful for face-to-face meetings.
Hundred-page reports are probably for archival purposes. It's understandable that a lot of people are more comfortable with paper archives than electronic archives, given the general low quality of software today, and the obsolescence, sometimes intentional, of file formats.
-- .. . Since I run their ftp+webserver for personal use for free, I might as well put up the link here.
Well, querying the web, I found that imatix actually has something remotely related
I also found Fujitsu Cobol for the Web.
I'm still trying to figure out what people mean by 'social skills' here.
use a package called html2ps. it can be found here. have a page generate the report, you can wget it if you have to. then convert and send to a printer.
if you wanna print to client machines, then use samba to send the print jobs to windows or linux clients.
gol
While not the simplest solution to your problem, it is industrial strength, LaTeX provides any and all formatting capabilities that you would ever need (provided you invest the time to learn :) and PDF is a (almost) open document format.
I wrote an application just like this in asp in about 2 days. But it was for credit card information and entry into an event. It's really not that hard.
Paperless Society Zealot! Woo!
In your ideal world, it may be the case that you can get away with a paper-free workplace. However, if I handed a disk to the guy who signs my paychecks instead of a printed report, he'd hand me a pink slip instead of a pay check.
The world is going paperless. It's not yet there.
MCH/VO S* W- N+++++ PEC+++ D(s++/r) A a+>+++ C* G++(++++) Q+ 666 Y
That's what Business Objects is designed to do. Of course, you can also just use your favorite server-side scripting language and do it yourself. Or, if you're using Oracle, you can just fire up Oracle Reporter or Oracle Forms. There are tons and tons of tools to do this.
Wa la! Beautiful printing from IE
Now I'm no grammar nazi, but I believe the word you're looking for here is Voila...
Most commercial vendors of business intelligence solutions, e.g. Cognos and Business Objects, have a web solution for building custom reports.
Actuate e.Reporting Suite?
It's not open source, and many of the development tools are exclusive to a Windows environment; but the application server can be hosted on a *nix box and talk to Oracle and other SQL databases. It's reasonably fast, allows for ad hoc and batch reporting, and can produce output in HTML, DHTML (IE-specific or standards-compliant), Excel, PDF, XML, and other formats.
MacOS, Windows, BeOS, GNOME, KDE: they're all just Xerox copies
Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister?
MacOS, Windows, BeOS, GNOME, KDE: they're all just Xerox copies
I haven't actually had a chance to use it, but have ran through their free online demos. It will generate Excel spreadsheets, HTML, and XML as well as charts in GIF/JPG. Even WML so your executive who "needs" a 100-page report can view it line-by-line on his cell phone from his golf cart. You can embed it in servlets (J2EE), JSP, or EJB's.
BTW, I would really make sure that reports that long are really required. I haven't designed a system in the last 5 years that needed that kind of reporting. We usually end up replacing those long reports with smaller, more customizable online reports. And it looks iReporting would do this just fine.
Use JES2FTP which takes reports from the spooler, converts to HTML (broken into pages) or PDF (your choice), and builds an index too if you want. These tools are great. Last time I saw them they were available at Data 21 For some reason your "batch reporting" and "hundreds of pages" ideas struck the ol' mainframe chord with me (which is the environment where I work). If I'm wrong, ignore this post.
Please consider -- for your own sake -- getting a flat panel LCD, upgrading to a 75Hz or 80Hz refresh capable CRT, or getting your glasses prescription updated. One of those three solutions solves the headache problem for 95% of users.
And a real headache is nothing to live with.
-Brian, who thanks science every day since they cured migranes.
Go to File->Page Setup, and look at the text boxes labeled "Header" and "Footer". Delete everything that is in them, and click OK.
Wa la! Beautiful printing from IE.
Is this rock and roll, or a form of state control?
Try PDFLib ( http://www.pdflib.com/ ). I've used it for generating reports from both Perl and PHP web apps, and it's worked great. You can allow users to set fonts, max. # of pages, etc etc.
According to their site, it supports:
ActiveX/COM for use with Visual Basic, Active Server Pages, Allaire ColdFusion, Borland Delphi etc.
ANSI C
Class wrapper for ANSI C++
Java (via Java Native Interface, JNI), including servlets
Perl
PHP hypertext processor
Python
Tcl
I think one of those languages should suit your needs.
With large, hundred-plus page reports, generating PDFs can take a while (and a large chunk of your server CPU) so you will probably want to cache the generated PDFs and serve them up statically for a few hours...of course, it depends on how often the data gets updated in your application.
Is this rock and roll, or a form of state control?
This is such a common thing to want to do, yet there seems to be no tools that allow this kind of thing.
Having given up on a consumer friendly solution, I implemented a printing solution using the MS WebBrowser control and XSL transform.
To do the pagination, you have to render approximately one page's worth of XML data at a time, then use the .offsetHeight property to measure exactly how big it is. Then you have to remove a few lines until you have exactly a page height! (phew)
Its not particularly fast, because of all the DHTML munging that goes on, but it was the only solution we could get to work sensibly
There's definitely a gap in the market for an XSL editor along the lines of DreamWeaver, but still there's no neat way of doing any kind of pagination with XSL.
There is a programming language called Perl which stands for Practical Extraction and Reporting Language. Give it a try...
Well, good points but...
;)
I find scribbling notes all over my laptop's LCD or my monitor doesn't have that "lasting" effect that notes on paper reports do
A lot of the people replying to this question are giving advice worth what it costs: nothing. Anyone can list the google search results for web reporting tools, but most of these aren't worth a crap if your requirements are for large loads. Crystal Reports: Great design tool. Useful in an office environment. Requires a dedicated server. Falls on its face under large loads. Formscape: Not useful for dynamically generated reports. All other report engines : one of the above HTML/text output: As mentioned, looks like crap printed. Real reporting requires grouping/subreports and even graphs. Have fun getting these to print. My company required a web-reporting tool for use by tens of thousands of users nationwide via TCP/IP connections. This means being able to handle hundreds of simultaneous dynamically generated reports. First, we tried a few of the products on the market but even the ones costing >$1,000,000 couldn't handle the load without a giant server farm. Next we tried a "roll your own" servlet/PDF solution. Nice idea, but if you are trying to do this on your real time app servers, system response times will suffer. The solution we settled on was: 1)custom report programs on a mid range server for each report type. 2) all report requests are submitted and processed by a batch manager which limits CPU load on the report server 3) finished reports are converted into PDF via a template file and stored in a table. 4) The users is directed to a pending reports page until the reports are complete. When complete, they can be downloaded as .pdf and viewed with the acrobat plug in
The lesson we learned - if you need to handle complex reports and heavy loads, you must custom code them. No reporting engine can handle it (yet).
Disclaimer first: after consulting with their software for 3 yrs., I recently joined the company. Trying not to give a sales pitch here, but why you might be interested: -Based on VB3, with object-oriented extensions. (In short, you can create your own class libraries to go between designs.) -It has it's own set of class libraries that can be drag-and-dropped in a design pane. -Query editor with same look and feel as Access. -Also, ability to paste in queries you've already written elsewhere. -Ability to query multiple databases of multiple types in the same report (and mesh results, with a bunch of code) -Version 5 now supports Java objects -Output is either DHTML or PDF -Report server that allows any report to be accessd and run via a URL, from whatever your web uses now (JSP,PHP,blah,blah,blah). Downside: -Steep learning curve for development (though basing it on VB helps). -Not cheap -If you want simple list reports, it's probably overkill.
I have been having success using XSL to style a report generated in XML to create an XML document that Microsoft Excel can load and print. You can do any formatting that can be done from the Excel UI, plus you can control how the report will be printed (landscape, breaks, etc...). Design the report the way you want it to look in Excel, then save as HTML and use that saved document as a template for your report.
2 k/ofxml2k.htm for the Office XML reference.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/officedev/ofxml
...has (mostly) what you're looking for. A relatively easy-to-use designer, a scalable server component which feeds the client-side control, and ActiveX and Java-based client-side controls which are embedded in the browser. The client-side controls have full printing capability, as well as exporing to a variety of formats.
The downside? It tends to be difficult to format complicated reports, it has a archaic data access layer which makes database independence difficult, and the server components only works with Windows/ASP.
--
Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.
Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.
- Nietzsche
Getting rid of old paper reports is much better for the environment than trying to figure out how to dispose of monitors down the road when they go bad. If each office has a computer in easy viewing distance, each manager/executive has a laptop that has a real time life of 3 or 4 years before it is obsolete, that is a big bunch of plastic and other materials to dispose of. Monitors contain lead, cathode ray tubes and other materials that are harmful to the environment. I don't condone waste either way, but to say that all paper should be done away with and computers used is just as irresponsible as wasting it.
This may get modded as flame-bait, but what the hell;
Avoid Crystal Reports at all costs if you can. It's irrating, confusing, and buggy, and it's been that way since I started using it in 1993. On every one job I take I swear I won't use Crystal again, but somehow I keep getting stuck with it, becuase it's already being used, or somebody somewhere thought it was a good idea. If you need formatting and page breaks go with some kind of PDF generator, and find one with a Java interface because you're already on J2EE.
Report generation is one of the necessary evils of business application development, so the best thing you can do is find something that will let the users create their own reports; instead of pestering you to do it for them.
End of grumpy report creator rant.
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www.lucernesys.comHorizon: Calendar-based personal finance
www.zope.org
"On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog!" - a dog
the client and server on the same lan. So, I must ask, Why, why, why are you considering a web solution if you need things that html will not produce? The right solutions for the right job.
- CrackElf
"Blake is an idealist, Jenna. He cannot afford to think." - Kerr Avon, Star One, Blakes 7
Ok, I remember I tried very long ago a JReport app that worked, but looking in the net one thousand have arisen. JBuilder 3 is shipped with a similar tool.
Of course, this applies if you're working with Java.
On the same topic, there's a funnier question: if you are programming in Java your site, you ought to have your data access and manipulations encapsulated, say in beans or EJB's. If you try to use a such a tool to generate reports, you step over this data access classes, something that is not recomendable. Anyone has idea of a tool that permits accessing via my own Persistence Layer and generate the reports anyway? I have searched, but cannot say any one.
.. to it. A paperless office does not exist. Paper is still the lowest common denominator.
Crystal Reports (http://www.crystaldecisions.net/homepage/) has a pretty cool Web service that displays a Crystal Report through a Java applet. Supports the CGI web application standard too.
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Does anyone remember
As a developer working for Hi-Mark Software, myself along with a few others developed such a product. The product is called WebMan. Although WebMan and its companion products are primarily marketed towards the travel industry, they can be used with any data.
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Kyle George
kgeorge@himark.com
My company asked me to build a report server which would create PDFs out of CSVs using pre-determined report templates. Using CSVs as a direct data source was a pain in the ass because we had to fiddle with ODBC. We found that it was much easier to work with Access files, and since the databases would be single tabled and no more than a few thousand records, it wouldn't be a problem. We got ourselves of a little utility that converts the CSV files to MDB, so the only step would be to take the MDB as a data source to convert it to PDF. We decided to use Crystal Reports because the report designer is very straight forward and easy to use. Personally, I have not used any other reporting system, but I was told by my boss that it was the best solution. We ended up using Visual Basic to integrate everything together. It's been in production for over 6 months now, with over 10,000 reports under it's belt, without any serious problems. At peak hours, it can generate reports at an average of 200 an hour, depending on the computer speed, and amount of records and complexity of the report.
I haven't used it, but this package called ReportMill that does exactly what you're talking about. I've heard people say it's very good. It costs money though.
Ya Crystal Reports is single server but ya'll are making it way too complicated. In Crystal 8 the web server is pretty slick. And just I got a copy of Crystal Enterprise that is supposed to be multi servers, distributed processing, etc. Will install soon and send feedback.