Reporting Best Practises (Are there any what do you do?)
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Hi, I am in the process of trying to find out what is the best practise for generating reports from an sql database useing different tables, that would be usefull to user on the Software access the DB, how do you do it? I come from a web design background and are now having to design a reporting engine for an ancient VB 6 application i have been lumped with.... I am used to having to build each report manually in html line for line and writting the formatting out in code, using sql querys for getting the data I need. but this is hard crap work and I would like to know if I am the only one doing it this way or do you have another way of doing it using some kind of report builder like crystal reports. Its just there must be a better and faster way to get usefull reports from a db without the hard work building every line in the report from different querys and functions that jump all over the place in your application and db. your insiteful comments will be greatly appreciated...
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Hi, I am in the process of trying to find out what is the best practise for generating reports from an sql database useing different tables, that would be usefull to user on the Software access the DB, how do you do it? I come from a web design background and are now having to design a reporting engine for an ancient VB 6 application i have been lumped with.... I am used to having to build each report manually in html line for line and writting the formatting out in code, using sql querys for getting the data I need. but this is hard crap work and I would like to know if I am the only one doing it this way or do you have another way of doing it using some kind of report builder like crystal reports. Its just there must be a better and faster way to get usefull reports from a db without the hard work building every line in the report from different querys and functions that jump all over the place in your application and db. your insiteful comments will be greatly appreciated...
If you're programming under .NET, I would suggest to use Microsoft's Reporting Technology (I think Crystal Report is a little more complicated, but that's just my personal opinion). It's easy--all you have to do is to design a report (Add new item -> Report), create an instance with parameters and attach it to your program. You don't have to worry about print margins or layout. They can be set by changing some variables, unlike HTML, which you'd have to mess with CSS. This is especially useful when you have to print labels. Plus, The Reporting Technology and Crystal Report comes with VS2005. If you're programming .NET you should have them installed already.