[Gllug] Database reporting library

[Mike Brodbelt]

On Fri, 2003-08-15 at 12:38, Richard Cottrill wrote:
> 
> Perl!
> 
> Use DBI/DBD and formats. I'll leave it as an excercise to the reader to 
> see if they can manage it in one (manageable) line. ;)
> 
> This works very well for plain text, and may suffice for other documents.

The problem with Perl and formats is that users often expect richer
formats than plain text, and want various bits of fancy formatting.

One thing we've found successful at work is using Perl/DBI to extract
the information from a database, and generating XML with XML::Writer. We
then pass that XML through Apache FOP, which takes the XML and an
appropriate XSLT stylesheet, and generates nice PDF output via XML-FO.
People have been most impressed with the results - far more so than with
the text only output from some things which were much harder to code....

Mike.


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