What do you think the ideal system for displaying reports looks like?

Question

Electronic accounting

Hello fellow programmers!

Almost every business application needs to show reports in one form or another.
It would be very interesting to know how you solve this problem (ready-made components, a self-written system, data output directly to HTML / Excel / PDF?

What is missing now? What are the most “sore” places that arise when implementing a reporting system? Which one do you think there must be an ideal system for creating reports?

I ask, because we want to do just that :).

I understand that the question is a bit strange and philosophical ;). But still, I really want to know your opinion ... Many thanks in advance!

Answer 1

A little about the implementation:
I somehow observed how complex reports were needed in the application. And it was also necessary that users in the application make reports for themselves. At the same time, the database was complex, not everything could be done with SQL. (because Rails/ActiveRecord was used).
In general, the thought suggested itself that the functionality of the application was simply overcomplicated and it was simply not necessary to do it.
But for some reason they did it (in fact, they made a universal reporting system for all occasions).
We came to the conclusion that the Excel pivot table constructor is a good example of a general report solution.
It was also noticed that in the pivot table, in the general case, these are three functions.
The first returns rows, the second columns. The third takes a row and a column as an argument and returns a value.
Along the way, a new functional programming language has been implemented to implement these features.
And in order to generate code in this language, a wizard (state machine) was made with an arbitrary number of steps. Here his code was no longer universal, but related specifically to our database structure. At the same time, its engine was universal.
All this was done for a long time ... In general, it more or less worked.
But then it suddenly turned out that users only say that they want to do any arbitrary reports, but in fact they do not want anything. They just want it to work. Probably they want several built-in reports, and they themselves do not know which ones.

Answer 2

2-4 beautiful analytical graphs, 2 interesting numbers, and below is a table with raw data :)
Something similar to status.github.com/graphs/past_day

Answer 3

An “ideal reporting system” is a reporting system that is ideally convenient for the end user.
Since all users have different needs and requests, there cannot be a single “ideal reporting system”. Some users need an editable Word document or Excel spreadsheet, others need a pdf document to print; ondim needs a lot of settings, we only need the "Display report" button. That is, it is necessary to build on the end user.

Answer 4

At the moment, we have an oracle database and reports on fastreport + a miracle of software - for it all to work, you need a separate computer with admin rights and a lot of patience and money)) The
ideal reporting system is definitely an HTML interface - so that it can be opened from any browser
to the client only the progress bar and the result.
Output in HTML / Excel / PDF will be convenient and sufficient for most users. (output in Excel is a separate song with cell formatting)
The report designer must operate with data blocks from which any “report” can be assembled.
And yes, users really don’t want to and can’t formulate anything.

Answer 5

As an option, it is convenient and practical to use the NodeJS template engine according to reviews. And I myself often used 1C to generate reports, while importing data from another source in the form of XML