What Data Reporting Tool?
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I'm wondering what data reporting tool you are using for tabular database report? - Crystal Report - Plain HTML or XML/XSL - MS Access - FrameMaker - Oracle Reports or what else? Does anyone know about review of reporting tools? Thanks Tom
Hey Tom, I've put a class library together for ADO which allows you to do some pretty rich reporting. If you're interested in looking at it, the site is www.ADOPro.com. Pau
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I'm wondering what data reporting tool you are using for tabular database report? - Crystal Report - Plain HTML or XML/XSL - MS Access - FrameMaker - Oracle Reports or what else? Does anyone know about review of reporting tools? Thanks Tom
I won't even pretend to give any sort of 'professional' advice, but in my current project, I'm using plain HTML files. The advantages I saw are that a) it's free - the only external program needed is IE and b) printing is taken care of by IE, so I don't really have to worry about it - this was a big concern, especially since some users will be printing on dot-matrix printers. Instead of actually writing much code for my reports, I use HTML templates sectioned out in comment lines and variables that I find and replace. It makes the report very easy to write from scratch and see how it will look, and it makes changes easier. Well, I hope I came off more coherent than I feel.. if not, I apologize :) Danie
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I'm wondering what data reporting tool you are using for tabular database report? - Crystal Report - Plain HTML or XML/XSL - MS Access - FrameMaker - Oracle Reports or what else? Does anyone know about review of reporting tools? Thanks Tom
I'm a long-time fan of Crystal Reports. There are cases where specific requirements might dictate a different tool, but Crystal's hard to beat for general purpose use. Maybe if you can give a few more details about your requirements, I can comment on Crystal's suitability
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I won't even pretend to give any sort of 'professional' advice, but in my current project, I'm using plain HTML files. The advantages I saw are that a) it's free - the only external program needed is IE and b) printing is taken care of by IE, so I don't really have to worry about it - this was a big concern, especially since some users will be printing on dot-matrix printers. Instead of actually writing much code for my reports, I use HTML templates sectioned out in comment lines and variables that I find and replace. It makes the report very easy to write from scratch and see how it will look, and it makes changes easier. Well, I hope I came off more coherent than I feel.. if not, I apologize :) Danie
We currently ship two applications and we took a different approach to printing with each program. I used something basically the same as Daniel's suggestion with our 'junior' product. This program generates HTML files on-the-fly for all displayed data and reporting. Users edit the data by clicking buttons/links in the pages to launch appropriate dialog boxes. This lets them print anything they can see on screen and I didn't have to write any extra code to handle it. Woohoo! Using templates also lets us ship a number of different 'themes' with the product which is a nice touch. I can bang out a new theme using FrontPage in a couple of hours and the themes can completely change the appearance of the program/reports. Users can change the look and feel of their reports with a couple of mouse clicks. Something that they just lurve. :-) Our higher end product uses Crystal Reports and presently ships with about 200 different reports. Crystal is great to work with at design-time once you get the hang of it (it's not that hard to learn). You do need to ship quite a few Crystal files with your app though. IIRC it added about 8MB (uncompressed) + individual report files (say 50kB each) to the total shipping package on our program. (I mention this as it may be a problem if you want to make your programs available for download from your web site.) Our reporting requirements are really basic, so for us, using Crystal is a bit like cracking a peanut with a sledge hammer, we just don't need or use many of Crystal's features. I've been working on a very simple replacement for Crystal Reports in my spare time. It just does the basics and will hopefully be a fairly small package to ship. If I ever get the time to finish it, I'll definately post the source code here if anyone's interested? Hope this helps. Steve
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We currently ship two applications and we took a different approach to printing with each program. I used something basically the same as Daniel's suggestion with our 'junior' product. This program generates HTML files on-the-fly for all displayed data and reporting. Users edit the data by clicking buttons/links in the pages to launch appropriate dialog boxes. This lets them print anything they can see on screen and I didn't have to write any extra code to handle it. Woohoo! Using templates also lets us ship a number of different 'themes' with the product which is a nice touch. I can bang out a new theme using FrontPage in a couple of hours and the themes can completely change the appearance of the program/reports. Users can change the look and feel of their reports with a couple of mouse clicks. Something that they just lurve. :-) Our higher end product uses Crystal Reports and presently ships with about 200 different reports. Crystal is great to work with at design-time once you get the hang of it (it's not that hard to learn). You do need to ship quite a few Crystal files with your app though. IIRC it added about 8MB (uncompressed) + individual report files (say 50kB each) to the total shipping package on our program. (I mention this as it may be a problem if you want to make your programs available for download from your web site.) Our reporting requirements are really basic, so for us, using Crystal is a bit like cracking a peanut with a sledge hammer, we just don't need or use many of Crystal's features. I've been working on a very simple replacement for Crystal Reports in my spare time. It just does the basics and will hopefully be a fairly small package to ship. If I ever get the time to finish it, I'll definately post the source code here if anyone's interested? Hope this helps. Steve
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I love your analogy of "cracking a peanut with a sledge hammer" !!! I'd definately be interested in your report thingy ( <-- technical word).. so please do post it if you ever get around to finishing it
G'day Daniel, >> I love your analogy of "cracking a peanut with a sledge hammer" I wish I could take credit for that one, but must confess to hearing it from someone else recently, and rather liking it. The report designer (tentatively called 'Report Studio') is a great example of just how handy web sites like Code Project are. After thinking about writing something like this for a few weeks, I decided to make a start one wet, miserable weekend. I started out downloading copious quantities of code from Code Project and Code Guru. Two hours later I started work on the program. About ten hours later I had the shell of the program running and it could to the basics:- - Draw a blank page on screen, - Zoom/scale/scroll the page, - Nifty ruler bars, - Flip between millimetres and inches on the page/rulers, - Drag-n-drop guide lines from the ruler bars, - Drag/reposition page margins from the ruler bars, - Dockable control bar (like the project window in VC++), - VC++ like push-pin properties box for drawing entities, - Serialization of report layouts via .INI like files (I'll add a binary file format later, but text files are handy for debugging). - Fully customizable tool and control bars, - A bunch of other neat stuff. The biggest job, by far, has been adding all the credits to the About Box! Granted, I wrote some fairly ratty code piecing all these things together, but my 'instant gratification' gene kicked in and I really wanted to see something on screen, yesterday. :-) Still, not bad for a days work. If I get the chance, I might throw a couple of pages of screen shots up on our web site to keep interested parties abreast of progress. Stev