Looking for a flexible Reporting solution

Question

Hi all:

I m looking at creative solutions for reporting, I have an app and now i need to create some reports from it.

I would be led to believe that the customer will be happy enough with excel reports, however what I want is that they have the freedom to create the reports themselves, without any help from development, so i need something simple yet powerful ( fun to work with would be a plus :) )

I use MS SQL Express.

Web or desktop deployment: it doesnt make any difference

Licensing costs Ideally none as its a very small operation

Open Source: preferred

Metadata modelling: none

Handle large amounts of data: not really, in the 100k records

large numbers of concurrent users: not really, 1 or 2 users

I remember I read about an csv solution somewhere but I cant remember if it came with a reporting engine of some sort

Thanks for your ideas

Answer 1

Allowing users to generate their own reports would be wonderful, but for anything beyond a simple report, this quickly require basic database skills. I've never seen a user-accessible report designer that users could actually design reports of any complexity with.

You're better off providing two things:

1. The most obvious reports with some filtering/sorting options. Common ways to do this are with Crystal for a desktop app or SQL Server Reporting Services for a web app.
2. The ability to export raw data to Excel. Office skills are far more common in most user groups than database skills. Your users will have a better chance of creating a report with an Excel chart than they will have of working through any report designer I've ever seen.