How would a centralized reporting solution be?

Question

I'm sorry for not being clear enough in my question, here we go again.

I'm in the middle of a research for defining a reporting tool and I've being studying a number of them: Active Reports is very good but expensive in comparison to DevExpress XtraReports (talking about features and support).

My customer requires me to tell him about "centralized" reporting and "local" reporting for a windows form application.

By centralized, I think he wants to mean that the reports are processed in the server and retrieved to the client. By local, I guess he wants to say the classic way to address a report: have the report definition within the application in the client, ask for data to the server and show the report.

Actually I pretty sure this is a nosense discussion, because the most important thing in a report processing is how you process the data. That may be more than 50% of the way, after that, the way that the report shows you the data is very important, but talking about having it "centralized" or "local" for me it just does not makes sense.

Let me know if this is still not good enough. Thanks!

Answer 1

Actually I pretty sure this is a nosense discussion, because the most important thing in a report processing is how you process the data. That may be more than 50% of the way, after that, the way that the report shows you the data is very important

This is a very reasonable question from a client, not nonsense. You're right that processing (turning database tables into a report source) and formatting (making the data look pretty on the report) are important, but that isn't everything. Delivery is also very important.

By centralized, I think he wants to mean that the reports are processed in the server and retrieved to the client. By local, I guess he wants to say the classic way to address a report: have the report definition within the application in the client, ask for data to the server and show the report.

Your understanding of "centralized" vs "local" is right on track, but you're neglecting how those reports are delivered. Local reports are usually delivered through your software running on the client's workstation. Centralized reports are usually delivered from a reporting server through a web browser. So think about it from the client's perspective: Centralized may be more attractive because all of their reports can be accessed from any capable web browser anywhere in the world. To most clients that sounds better than having to use your software on a computer in their office, just to access reports.