Reporting in Web Applications
Studio Support for Web Application Development
Web Reporting with PDF Files
As with our Windows applications, developers will not be locked down to any specific reporting solution. Therefore, while it is our intention to provide specific tools and examples for several different reporting solutions, it is also our intention to provide low-level features that will allow you to use a variety of other reporting systems.
Reporting Types
At a low level, there are two abstract types of Web reports: fixed document and interactive.
Fixed Document Reporting
Fixed document primarily means being able to display a fixed generated document. For all practical purposes, this means PDF. The mechanism used for creating this PDF document does not matter. Web applications will be able to take a PDF document from some location and stream it to the client. Ideally, for security reasons, that location should not be a public web-share.
Web applications must be able to read the document and stream the PDF data to the client. One should be able to display this document embedded within the current application web page or in a separate browser tab. This is a low-level requirement that will be built into the framework.
Any report generator capable of generating PDF documents can use this general capability.
Currently, PDF documents can be streamed using ASP (Active Server Page) technology. We prefer not to rely on ASP and therefore consider this to be a transitory solution. Both the interim ASP-based streaming and its eventual replacement technology would not be specific to any actual reporting solution and can be applied to any report generation mechanism that creates PDF documents.
Interactive Reporting
An interactive report is one that is built dynamically as you navigate through it.
Reporting Solutions
At a higher level, we are planning on offering multiple reporting solutions: DataFlex Reports or Dynamic AI.
DataFlex Reports
DataFlex Reports is a software tool for delivering timely, well-organized reports and information to the people that need it. Designed to be used by end-users, power-users, and professional software developers alike, DataFlex Reports works with a wide variety of data sources including Microsoft SQL Server, IBM DB2, Oracle, MySQL, Pervasive SQL, PostgreSQL, Microsoft Access, the DataFlex embedded database, and more.
The initial integration of DataFlex Reports into DataFlex Web applications will use the Fixed Document Reporting model.
Just as with Windows applications, developers will use DataFlex Reports to design the report. The Web application will use the reporting engine to run these reports and generate a PDF, which will be streamed to the client.
In addition, report views can be built by the developer that would allow the application user to control configuration options that the report allows. For instance, a user would make their selections in the report view, which will be sent to the WebApp server. The server will use DataFlex Reports to generate the report as a PDF and stream it to the client.
Dynamic AI
Dynamic AI’s automated Business Intelligence features simplify the delivery of real-time dashboards, queries, reports, and analysis.
At the simplest level, the DataFlex Web application will be used to launch a Dynamic AI dashboard in a browser instance. From that point on, Dynamic AI takes over. It should be noted that this simple launching of Dynamic AI adds an extremely powerful capability to a Web application. Just calling this a “reporting solution” is probably not doing it justice.
It will also be possible to create Dynamic AI front ends in Web applications that would allow it to specify any number of the reporting parameters before DAI is launched. This allows a developer to use DAI as a more traditional (and perhaps more limited) reporting tool. We will be providing examples showing how to use Dynamic AI and DataFlex Web applications together.
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