Open Source Reporting Engines

Question

As a followup to this question can anyone give me pointers to free/open-source report engines? I'd prefer something that I can use in C++ but I'm sure almost anything could be made to work with C++ given enough time and effort. I gather there's one in BIRT but are there others available? This would be part of the open source software stack to replace MS Access with a free (as in freedom)/open alternative. Oh and because it came up with that other question, everything being contained in one file is not an important criteria in this particular case.

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EDIT: Modified this to a community wiki question to make it easier to modify.

Answer 1

I highly recommend BIRT as a reporting solution. We use it for generating HTML and PDF reports (it can do more) for our web reporting solution.

Report designs are done in Eclipse (standard drag-and-drop sort of stuff) and deployed to a web server for running.

As of Eclipse Ganymede, BIRT is now one of the 20-or-so core projects in Eclipse. And, it's free.

Answer 2

Another OSS reporting system is Jasper Reports. Pentaho also make a reporting system based on open-source components. However most OSS BI technology is quite java-centric and BIRT, Jasper and Pentaho are no exception.

For C++ you could consider ReportLab or one of the other Python based ones if you don't mind embedding a Python run-time in your application. This has the advantage that the reports could be easily customised in the field without having to rebuild your application and deploy a new build.

Answer 3

I will second with Jasper as Jasper is highly customizable and comparable to powerful Crystal reports.

Answer 4

OOFILE contains a C++ report-writer that's fairly capable and cross-platform.

It's driven by very simple code rather than having a GUI for composing reports (that's underway) and is very definitely industrial strength, having been deployed on tens of thousands of desktops around the world since 1997. The preview and printing work on Mac and Windows. The RTF and HTML output work also on generic Unix.

I'd love some help with getting it up on SourceForge as it is unfortunately a rather low priority compared to other projects I'm doing. I'm also working on a port of the pure C++ engine to REALbasic.

Answer 5

These are my favorites: BIRT, Jasper Reports, G2 Report Engine. They are java-based, open-source projects. Reports can be generated via Servlets (web), command line, or directly in your code via and API.