[plug] [OT] Report generating utils windows

[Craig Ringer]

Paul Arch wrote:
>>Does Python install under Windows? Are you comfortable with Python? If
>>so, can you use ReportLab? It comes with Craig Ringer's endorsement ;-)

Admittedly my somewhat incoherent and zombie-like endorsement at the 
time. Next time I'll get enough sleep first ;-)

> Python does install under windows.  Am I comfortable with it ? Well, I
> havent actually programmed in python before :) I do have a book somewhere
> though.
>
>  Is there a visual tool for creating the reports ? Or do you have to code
> from scratch each time ?

 From scratch, I'm afraid. Reportlab is an extremely useful tool, but is 
definitely not for everyone or all purposes.

I'm using it for things like generating invoices from our accounting 
system, and for that job it does great. It's also great for extremely 
dynamic reports. It's not well suited for end users or if you're doing 
many different simple reports (especially one-offs) because of the 
coding requirement.

It wouldn't be hard to create a generic module that used ReportLab to 
create a PDF with a table of data retrieved from an SQL query, so that 
all you had to do was import the module, then run a query and call a 
function in the module to generate the PDF with the results array and a 
tuple of column headings.

If you're looking for something like a cheap/free alternative to Crystal 
Reports, I can't help you I'm afraid. I think there's a reason Crystal 
costs such a jaw-dropping amount of money :-( . I have an old version 
lying around here that we don't even use - how wrong is that?

--
Craig Ringer