[plug] [OT] Report generating utils windows

[Bernd Felsche]

On Friday 13 August 2004 11:28, Paul Arch wrote:
> I have a software system which requires report generation from Windows. 

You mean the users will be writing reports, or selecting a series of
options?

> I have been using ODBC from activestates Perl to drive excel
> spreadsheets for report generation, but this is too time consuming
> for me to create :)

It's also evil and will earn you half an eternity in hell! :-)

> All the data is retrieved from mySQL database.

Depending on the sensitivity of the data, it may be worthwhile to do
the report generation "behind" a web server.

> Anyone know of any open sourced solutions that can create reports ? I
> have seen some in php, and java also.  But I want to try and limit
> assortment of deployed applications.

Putting the application on an Intranet server makes sense if you
don't want to go through installation and re-installation hassles on
the desktops. It also has the advantage of not saturating your
network with ill-conceived queries from the database.

-- 
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