Custom Reporting Software

[roopurt18]

Has anybody here had experience with custom reporting on a large scale?

 

Our web product is an extension of a server system that, as one of its primary functions, generates many reports.  We do custom reporting in our server system; however we have the problem that these custom reports require a lot of programming work.  Everything in our server reports is so hard-coded that even a simple request to change a font-size could require several hours of work, which is ridiculous.

 

Our reports will need to be invoked from the web interface, pull data from our MySQL database, and preferably dump output as a PDF file.  In addition, we need to accommodate client requests such as "Can we take the current sales report and change the < insert_random_field_or_item >?"  Basically, all of our clients want slight modifications to existing reports, and as a consequence of poor design the reports in our other system look like this:

if(client == THIS_CLIENT)
  DO THIS
else if(client == SOME_OTHER_CLIENT)
  DO THIS INSTEAD
else if( ) ...
else
  DO DEFAULT REPORT

 

This is something we probably won't be addressing for a couple more months, but I see us as having two options.  Either we use an existing product or I develop one for us.  I'm much more in favor of using an existing product as it would be time-consuming for me to do this all myself.  I'm not trying to place the burden of designing the reports on our clients, we can train our own employees to use software to create the reports for our clients and expose the reports to them.

 

Once we get closer to addressing this issue I'll be doing some research into existing products, I'm posting this because someone here might be able to give me a head start in the best solution.

 

Cheers!

[ober]

Simple Solution is one that my company took.  Give them a report creation tool to create their own reports.  Boom.  No maintenance.. no bitching.  They change what they want, you just provide them the data and the tools to filter/paramaterize/fields to pick from, etc.

[roopurt18]

Just curious, how many developers worked on your reporting tool and how long did it take to write?

[AndyB]

I'm guessing it wasn't this Simple Solution - http://www.bramton.com/

[roopurt18]

I think he meant "The simple solution..."  After reading his post I immediately googled for "Simple Solution" and came up with all sorts of cleaning products.