Yes and No. I've built loads of reports using very expensive reporting software such as Business Objects and other dedicated reporting solutions that are often oriented towards reporting from data sources such as SQL databases. The cost megabucks.
Their main advantage is having a graphical report builder with sophisticated behaviour for data breaks and conditional layout changes. In general the client reporting requirements are usually fairly conservative in terms of look and feel - laying out lines of text with minimal graphics support. In practice I suspect that 3/4 of the developers on Flexcoders could roll their own reports given a simplified PDF generation SDK (that didn't involve a server round-trip). Paul ----- Original Message ----- From: Rick Winscot To: flexcoders@yahoogroups.com Sent: Thursday, July 17, 2008 6:07 AM Subject: RE: [flexcoders] Who is using FlexReport? I agree whole-heartedly with Anatole. Reporting requirements are commonly very specific - and as I hear about what people want in a reporting toolkit. they describe 'the' solution as being generally purposeable which doesn't make any sense. If you want a flexible solution you are going to have to sacrifice some of the concreteness of the report - if you want a rock solid report you are going to have to get your hands dirty to make it happen. If you would rather buy a reporting solution. expect to cough up dough commensurate with the quality of the product. The big problem, as Anatole already surmised, is that people's eyes are typically much larger than their pocket-book. Rick Winscot From: flexcoders@yahoogroups.com [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Anatole Tartakovsky Sent: Wednesday, July 16, 2008 12:35 PM To: flexcoders@yahoogroups.com Subject: Re: [flexcoders] Who is using FlexReport? Report Wirter is a delicate topic. We wrote reporting solution in 2006 - complete stack from database to end-user UI designer to the optimized client to the PDF. However, the current mind set in the enterprises - if it is third party product it has to be open source and free. So instead of pushing it as a product, we are packaging it as a service. After all, building low cost solution for mass market requires mass market and enterprises with flex reporting are not mass market yet. I believe most of reporting solutions I have seen are just tip of the iceberg, with services beneath to recover develpoment costs. Sincerely, Anatole Tartakovsky Farata Systems On Wed, Jul 16, 2008 at 11:34 AM, Derrick Anderson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: amen brother, to be honest I like FlexReport- but it's not ready for an enterprise app. it's a good starting point, but I really need something much more robust. i'm in the same boat, would love to provide all the great reportability and UI that has been touted but more and more i see people 'hacking' out flex reports in anything other than 'flex'. Adobe, where is the flex report builder??? d. On Wed, Jul 16, 2008 at 11:10 AM, ansury2001 <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: I need some advice on whether FlexReport is ready for "real" use. I've already taken a look at it some, and other than it being a pain to setup and rather slow, I think it may work well enough. But I want to get some 3rd party opinions on others who have used it-- or, what other solutions have you come up with? Are most people just using 3rd party tools like Oracle BI Publisher or Crystal Reports, resorting to that primitive "HTML round-trip" stuff? ^_^ I also would like to provide users with report building capabilities. I know reporting is complex, but has anyone done anything similiar or had any experience creating a report builder in Flex? Something like ClearBI would be great. (Unfortunately ClearBI has no user base, no support, no community, extremely restrictive setup requirements, is almost impossible to setup and get working, isn't cheap (considering what you're getting), and seems like a VERY risky choice for reporting.) As a side rant... Flex is not going to take off in an "enterprise environment" as Adobe seems to be claiming it is ready for until we can do reporting natively in the swf app, without a ton of issues and work to do. I don't care whether it's built into Flex, created separately by Adobe, or built by a third party, but a real solution is going to be needed very soon, before something like Silverlight exploits this weakness. FlexReport won't be this solution no matter how good it gets, because it's scope isn't large enough. Users need to be able to create their own reports using the reporting interface!
