[Gllug] Reporting Tools

[Mike Brodbelt]

On Thu, 2004-03-04 at 20:39, Mamading Ceesay wrote:
> On Thu, 04 Mar 2004 20:30:46 +0000

> I'd be interested in finding out your views on which are the most viable
> tools, even if they don't currently compare to Crystal.
> 
> Is this for your own use, for the use of developers or non-technical
> users?

Varies. As a bit of background, we use Crystal at work to pull data out
of a database and present it nicely. We have VB front-ends to a couple
of databases, and the crystal viewer plugs into those apps nicely. Most
of the reports are written by users with some limited experience in
databases and Crystal, but not directly by IT staff. We have some
problems with Crystal anyway, and I'm trying to move things to a more
platform neutral framework as a general principle, to open up desktop
options in future. Crystal generates quite idiosycratic SQL, and making
it work properly with all databases (Postgres, MySQL) isn't always easy.
It allows only a single level of nesting, making some reports
non-viable. Also the fact that it locks each report to a specific
printer is maddening, though I know they do it to work round a Windows
misfeature.

I've looked (briefly) at several reporting tool options. Of the ones
I've seen so far, Report Manager looked the best, though it's database
bindings aren't great. Datavision was just too limited - I couldn't
possibly give it to non-techies, even those who do have some database
knowledge. Jasper reports and JFreeReports are on my list, but I've not
looked at them yet. I'll probably gp back to Report Manager and see if I
can make it work better in the future. It also has the advantage of
being native code, not Java. Java is nice in theory, but the performance
hit causes problems in practice. Anything I choose has to be acceptable
to the users, and exchanging Crystal for something with 1/4 the
performance that doesn't fix the other problems won't fly.

Technically, the best setup I've found has been to use a perl program to
generate XML from the database, and convert that to PDF on the fly with
Apache FOP. We've done this, and serving the generated report over http
means that it can plug seamlessy into the VB apps. It's also not locked
to a particular printer, the XML generating program is not limited like
Crystal is, and PDF is cross platform, so we can plug it into platform
neutral stuff in the future. The killer is that only IT staff can write
them, as it takes a lot more knowledge than Crystal. So, for all it's
faults, Crystal is still the best compromise for me at the moment.

Mike.




-- 
Gllug mailing list  -  Gllug at gllug.org.uk
http://lists.gllug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/gllug