[plug]database front-end scripting tools, and Tuesday's Meeting

[Bret Busby]

"Anthony J. Breeds-Taurima" wrote:
> 
> Hello All.
>         Next Tusedays (12/09/2000) meeting will be held at:
> 
> Tennyson Group Office
> Lvl 2
> 1 Havelock St
> West Perth 6005
> 
> and will commence at 19:30.
> 
> Leon Brooks, will give am updated  talk on PHP4 and SQL.  Entitled
>         "Dynamising web pages with PHP4 and SQL"
> 

I have a question (so, what else is new?).

We have a database, that we have written for a customer, that was
written in MS Access. Over the years, with many changes, it got to the
stage, where it needs to be rewrittten, to refine it, and, now, extra
functionality is also wanted.

We got Visual Studio 6, with Visual Foxpro, as it appeared more
powerful, and, the tables were stored as separate files, etc, so, it
appeared to have many benefits, over MS Access. However, it appears that
Visual Foxpro 6 has lousy reporting. And, the customer wants either the
most complicated report, or, the two most complicated reports, to
include extra fuctionality, including a bar graph representation of some
of the data that is stored in one of the sub-reports, that is embedded
in one of the reports.

What the two (most complicated) reports involve, are several embedded
sub-reports, created from accessing several tables, at present resulting
in reports of a graphical (by font, etc), text-based nature, forming the
final reports, with sub-reports side by side, and, offset (one to the
right, and the others in a series, alongside, and, above and below, the
sub-report to the right). The customer now wants, also, a graphical
representation of a summary of one of the sub-reports, displayed as a
vertical bar graph, under the sub report to the right. The sub-reports
may or may not appear, depending on which sub-report it is, and, whether
the quantities that the particular sub-report returns, are zero (in
which case it does not appear), or, non-zero.

So, this was investigated (as to whether it could be done, and, if so,
how), with Visual Foxpro 6. The graph was no problem, but, apart from
the graph, the reporting is lousy, with no provision for sub-reports,
and, with the column names on the report, only being the field names
allocated to a table (as in apparently unable to do "select.... from...
as ..."). And, only one report (no subreports), appears able to be
included in a report.

We looked through Visual Basic books, and, found the consistent response
"Visual basic has only simple reporting tools - for more complicated
reports, use a third-party application".

So, we found an MS Access book, that appears to give information as to
how to do it (note, the version of MS Access, is Access 97); but, the
forms in that, have wonky things - like colour problems (from memory,
the form background colour gets set, but, a sub-form tabs device thing,
defaults to the desktop colour scheme, which could lead to really weird
colour combinations, and make the application quite unpleasant to use).

The customer also wants networking incorporated in the new software
version, for a peer to peer network, where he uses Win98, and
applications that run on it, on other PC's that are connected to the PC,
on which the data is mostly entered, and the reports produced.

So, I thought, stuff it - we are getting problems, trying to do it with
MS based products, unless we have to buy expensive, third-party
software, which would have to be on-charged and on-sold to the customer,
significantly increasing the price of the work, which we do not want to
make even more expensive; why not investigate using a Linux based web
application solution, with the data entry PC, as a web server. So, we
looked through some PHP and Perl books, and, we can't find any capacity
for outputting data as graphical graphs. We have seen an example (a
character based usage graph for a web site) of a character based graph,
in the Perl 5 HOW_TO book, but, no other reference to graphs, in any of
the Perl or PHP books, at which we looked. One of the PHP books
referenced, was "Building Database Applications for the Web Using PHP3".

What we need to know, is, whether PHP or Perl, or, some similar
Linux-based, web oriented, application, can be used to generate
reasonably complex reports, with embedded sub-reports, and, graphical
(as opposed to character-based) dynamic graphs, able to be embedded in
the reports.

I have also looked at some Java books, including "Database Programming
with Visual J++", but, Java is lousy for output formatting anyway (and,
from what I understand, file-handling), and I didn't find anything
useful.

Without going into spending heaps of money on expensive, proprietary,
third-party reporting tools, such as Cold Fusion, or Cognos, etc, does
PHP, or Perl, or any similar application, have the capability to do what
we need?

-- 

Bret Busby

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