[thelist] PDF report generator

[Mattias Thorslund]

Eduardo Kienetz wrote:
> On 6/27/06, Jerry <jerryr at asia.com> wrote:
>   
>> Mattias or anybody had any luck with this since the last post?
>>
>> I'd be most interested if someone found a nice tool to generate reports from
>> from a database from a web interface.
>>
>> Jerry
>>     
>
> Good time for a tip :)
>
> <tip type="report generator" author="Eduardo Bacchi Kienetz">
> Agata Report is a reporting tool that runs on Windows and Linux, reads
> data from PostgreSQL, MySQL, Firebird/Interbase, SQLite, DBF and many
> others, and generates exports as TXT, PDF, XML, HTML, CSV and as Open
> Office document. It also has a web interface to generate reports.
> Available in Portuguese, English, Italian, Deutsch and French.
> Spanish+swedish on the way.
> Can't believe? Check screenshots at http://www.agata.org.br/screen/index.html
> Brazilian government already uses it and many more businesses too.
> It's author is an incredible person too (Pablo Dall'Oglio).
> </tip>
>
>   

Yes, I checked out Agata Reports, too. While I find it impressive, there
were a couple of things that were roadblocks to me.

>From memory:

* My application generates the SQL statements already.  I keep (and
define) the database meta-data in XML files, and my application uses
this to generate the SQL statements automatically. Agata seems to
require that the user defines the SQL for each report within the
client.  I couldn't find a way to simply pass the SQL to the report (but
maybe I didn't look hard enough?).

* No WYSIWYG-style designer.  While Agata seems to have a pretty
expressive set of tools for defining good-looking list-style reports
(and labels, etc.), many of my reports will imitate a printed form
(government forms such as injury report forms, OSHA logs) with often
pretty complicated layouts.  I'm hoping to use non-programmers to define
the report layouts (there is an immense number of possible reports), and
they will probably have a hard time with a non-graphical design interface.

So, unfortunately it seems like Agata concentrates on the features that
I don't need help with (defining the data structure), and doesn't
support some of the features I need. I was impressed by it, though.

I have explored some other approaches as well, but they involve
installing either OpenOffice.org (and X.org), or Java. That would expand
the installation requirements for my application, since it otherwise
only needs PHP and MySQL. Since I plan to redistribute the application,
this would complicate the installation process for people who want to
install it on their servers.

OpenOffice.org would otherwise be a pretty attractive solution, since it
generates very pretty-looking PDF documents, and fast.  There's a PHP
class that merges data into OOo documents (without requiring OOo to be
installed on the server), and another that uses OOo to convert the
document to PDF, Word, etc.

The most developed open-source report generator, JasperReports, is
Java-based. There are several graphical report design clients to choose
from, and it looks quite capable The downside is the Java requirement.

I still haven't made the decision one way or another, but instead
concentrated on implementing other features of my application. I have
also made a rudimentary HTML-based report interface that fills the need
partially. For reports that require more precise formatting, the need
remains.

If there are plans to implement more of the features I mentioned above,
I would be very interested.

Cheers,

Mattias