Reporting Practice

Report Types

Of course, many practice areas are sexier than reporting, but nothing is more fundamental to many applications. In fact, we've created so many reports with so many tools that we've developed a whole language to talk about their possible variations, including:

• Self-contained reports (that do their own data processing)
• Thin reports (that handle only the visual layout, relying on preprocessing queries and procedures to prepare the data)
• Web-based reports
• Reports that end-users can customize
• Tabular reports with break-point summaries
• Summary reports that allow users to drill down to detail from preview mode
• Reports as forms
• Reports as mail merge letters
• Reports as mailing labels
• Reports to produce bar code labels
• Reports that export their output to Adobe Acrobat files
• Multi-frame reports with many charts and tables on a single page
• Reports that supply chapters or sections for larger "books"
• Reports used only for their raw data output
• Cross-tabular reports

Report Reusable Technologies

We've created a number of reusable technologies for report writing, including:

• Reports Explorer for managing collections of Crystal Reports
• A component for controlling the Microsoft Access report writer using OLE, including designing, previewing, and printing
• A component that can export any data table into an Excel spreadsheet using OLE
• A module that can assemble Adobe Acrobat files from multiple reports, build a table of contents, and paginate the resulting document
• The Visual Chart Production System for mass-producing data-driven charts (see our Data Visualization Practice)
• A dynamic, WYSIWYG grid component that end-users can customize and that allows users to both enter data and print the results -- a kind of read-write report writer
• A set of components to facilitate end users building, saving, and reusing queries for reports

Oh, and ask us about metadata-driven reports over a beer sometime. We'd love to go on and on ...