Consuming web services with reporting tools

Question

Hi all,

a customer of mine happend to ask me to come up with a technical solution for the following scenario:

• basis is a crm tool where the customers (i.e. the ones who bought the system) are not wanted to access the database for queries directly (in terms of table level access)
• there's plenty of reporting in the software, but sometimes it's just not exactky what's needed, so some sort of interface for external reporting tools is required

--> beeing 'state of the art' my customer want's to use web services for this; which IMHO is definitly not the way to do this; I'd favorize the creation of VIEWS which the crm customers can use to feed their reporting tools via ODBC for example

So, what's you guys opinion on this, how would you approach this scenario? Any best practises?

K

Answer 1

I thing that web-services is a nice solution. Using VIEWS - is using db authorization. While using WS you can be more secure :-)

Answer 2

How about empowering the customer to be able to write custom modules or plugins to the CRM software? If the built in reports don't suffice, they can quickly roll out their plugin to accomplish their objectives. IMO, exposing APIs is a much better approach. Also. there's nothing wrong with customers accessing the database tables directly. But the latter approach may be more cumbersome to some customers.

Your mileage may vary.

Answer 3

As I know, RAQ Report is a pure web-based java reporting tool. Users can easily and fast create kinds of complicate reports and publish plain HTML page report in browser with it.