Suggestions on MySQL Web Based Reporting Tools

[BigDave77]

Hello All

I am leading a project to develop a web database using MySQL on Linux / Apache. For reporting, we would like to do it through an HTML page and give the user parameters to run the report. I would like to avoind hard coding the reports, if possible. I reviewed Crystal Reports, and they have a web reporting system, but it runs on NT. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks

Dave

 

[Hokey]

All of our web database reports are run through custom apps with PHP (which plays very well with MySQL). You can write HTML forms where a user can enter in what parameters they wish to see. A PHP script could then use those parameters to query the database .... compile the information ... and generate reports in HTML back to the users browser. If you compile PHP with the GD library you can even create some nifty dynamic graphs to impress the suite and ties.

http://www.php.net

I have use Crystal Reports for a lot of my MS SQL database reporting, and have been able to do everything (plus a whole lot more) in PHP that I could in CR.

 

[rycamor]

If you need better control over layout for printing, you could use the PHP extension for creating PDF documents. You could even have the server display the PDF document locally, but send the same PDF file to a printer on the server or on the network. See

http://www.php.net/pdf.

Or... it wouldn't surprise me if there are some tools out there which can take XML data and turn it into a nicely formatted printed document. Then you can just output your report values embedded in whatever XML tags and properties the tool specifies. Right off the bat I can tell you that IE5+ has some very interesting capabilities to render XML with fine control over print kerning and layout.

Or, for the ultimate in nut-and-bolts method, you could read the specs for any of the open layout methods such as TEX (good for printing form Unix) or RTF (formats nicely in most wordprocessors such as Word, WprdPerfect, etc...). These formats are simply other markup languages, so you are just dealing with text to output from PHP.