S
smat-consulting
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Just am going through the same issue - for the last year or so! Horrible! There used to be Report Builder, and Actuate, and several others, as much as I remember. Now PSC basically leaves it up to us to fend for ourselves. 
pdf-include is a great tool to create pdf files. But it is cumbersome - there seems to be no right-adjusted output, for example. drawing and writing uses a different measurement (pixels vs. columns?), so if you want to draw a line you first have to try to figure out where the heck on the page you are to place it. However, for forms it is amazing how easy it still is to get something really nice-looking together. pdf-include is something for programmers - every document is an able program, which needs to be compiled. I haven't used docxfactory. Was just evaluating YellowFin. An amazing tool! Except, since it is all browser based, you can't really produce paper-printable reports or forms. If your users are ok with having the data only displayed (older folks tend to want to kill trees and print everything), YellowFin has some great features. The big disadvantage with that is, though, it's using SQL to get at the data. If you've ever done anything in SQL you'll know how retarded that approach is! Plus the constant problem of SQL widths needing to be re-calculated. YellowFin has a good idea by having the developer define "view"s of the data. That way you can plug together typical data-sets the end-users want, rather than requiring them to be able to read an ER digram and understand all the intricacies of your data-model. Crystal Reports used to have some way to get at it from within progress. That seems gone. They have a java-runtime and a vb runtime. VB is useless, as it means you can't deploy your app on unix. Java runtime package is so badly built (or was 1/2 year ago when I looked at it), that it ws not possible for me to get it to even simply start up! Missing jar files galore... Well, my friend, if you need printable reports, see if docxfactory does it. Otherwise, I wish you good luck!!! BTW, I'm in the process of getting a system together to allow users to define their reports, and have them generated dynamically. But, this is highly complex - not even sure if I'm going to be able to make it work reasonably well. Also, it might requires a really good data-model and consistency in naming your fields and tables. And, given that dynamic stuff takes significantly longer than static, I'm not sure if the performance would be sufficient for your situation (my application is browser based, and all reports and larger processes are executed by a batch-process, which sends an email with the result - so performance is not such a big issue for us)
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pdf-include is a great tool to create pdf files. But it is cumbersome - there seems to be no right-adjusted output, for example. drawing and writing uses a different measurement (pixels vs. columns?), so if you want to draw a line you first have to try to figure out where the heck on the page you are to place it. However, for forms it is amazing how easy it still is to get something really nice-looking together. pdf-include is something for programmers - every document is an able program, which needs to be compiled. I haven't used docxfactory. Was just evaluating YellowFin. An amazing tool! Except, since it is all browser based, you can't really produce paper-printable reports or forms. If your users are ok with having the data only displayed (older folks tend to want to kill trees and print everything), YellowFin has some great features. The big disadvantage with that is, though, it's using SQL to get at the data. If you've ever done anything in SQL you'll know how retarded that approach is! Plus the constant problem of SQL widths needing to be re-calculated. YellowFin has a good idea by having the developer define "view"s of the data. That way you can plug together typical data-sets the end-users want, rather than requiring them to be able to read an ER digram and understand all the intricacies of your data-model. Crystal Reports used to have some way to get at it from within progress. That seems gone. They have a java-runtime and a vb runtime. VB is useless, as it means you can't deploy your app on unix. Java runtime package is so badly built (or was 1/2 year ago when I looked at it), that it ws not possible for me to get it to even simply start up! Missing jar files galore... Well, my friend, if you need printable reports, see if docxfactory does it. Otherwise, I wish you good luck!!! BTW, I'm in the process of getting a system together to allow users to define their reports, and have them generated dynamically. But, this is highly complex - not even sure if I'm going to be able to make it work reasonably well. Also, it might requires a really good data-model and consistency in naming your fields and tables. And, given that dynamic stuff takes significantly longer than static, I'm not sure if the performance would be sufficient for your situation (my application is browser based, and all reports and larger processes are executed by a batch-process, which sends an email with the result - so performance is not such a big issue for us)Continue reading...