Chris, As far as generating reports, I've had the opportunity to use FOP to build PDF reports. Granted, this doesn't relate to the Express Reports package you referred to, but this seems to be a fairly common approach that might pop up in your hunt for various reporting methods. In a nutshell, the workflow progressed as follows: 1. User would specify some reporting parameters from a webpage and submit the form 2. The backend reporting would generate a resultset and populate that resultset into a reporting bean 3. The Castor package was used to dynamically persist that data into an in-memory XML document 4. FOP used that in-memory XML document and merged it w/ a pre-written (static) XSL file to build an in-memory PDF doc 5. That in-memory PDF doc was sent back to the browser for viewing.
If you have to go w/ PDF for reports (not always the case), I believe that the advantages here are that you can get relatively fast app development speeds from this methodology (vs using something like iText.....fast performance-wise, but a royal pain in the a$$ to work with) and there's good mail lists supporting both FOP and Castor so really the only thing you need to worry about is pulling the right info from your DB and formatting it correctly. However, I've found that even small reports ( < 5 pages) can take upwards of 15-20 seconds to generate and send back....some people see this as not that bad, others may see that time as unacceptable. Also I've heard that this approach tends to break down past ~20-30 page PDF reports because FOP just takes too long to generate them....in these cases we've had to go w/ iText. Just another approach to consider if you're doing reports. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Chris Hane" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "Struts Users Mailing List" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Cc: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Thursday, January 17, 2002 2:12 PM Subject: Reporting Writing > > Group, > > This is a bit off topic; however, there seems to be a good discussion going > on. I'm new to the java world (less than 1yr) and am using struts to > develop an internal application. One of the requirements is to generate > reports. I'm currently rolling my own reports using struts/jsp. > > I was wondering if any out there had experience with robust reporting > packages (free or commercially available) that they would recommend to help > create dynamic reports pulling information from a SQL database. I know of > several that run on windows NT; however, I am looking for a Java based > application or API set that could run on Linux & windows. > > I found one out there called Espress Report that I just started to > evaluate. If anyone has had experience with it, what are your thoughts. > > Thanks, > Chris > [EMAIL PROTECTED] > > > -- > To unsubscribe, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > For additional commands, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > > > -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> For additional commands, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
