looking for report generation tool (MySQL)

[ginahoy]

A friend is helping me build an interactive form for my new website, sorta like what H&R Block uses for self-serve online tax forms. He's using PHP and MYSQL. The objective is for my clients to be able to create an account, log in, and create project files by completing the interactive form.

One thing that's not clear to me is the appropriate mechanism for creating reports from the online MYSQL database. Some reports will be specific to a project, while others will summarize data across multiple projects or multiple clients. Some will be for internal use, and others will be provided to clients as PDFs. Most importantly, I need to be able to "roll my own" reports in-house, as required.

The way I imagine this would work would be for me to download the contents of the database daily, or as required, and then open up some sort of report creation tool specific to MYSQL. Over time, I would define a suite of basic reports that satisfies my needs.

Although this is my first web development project, I'm highly technical and have a bit of experience with MS Access. I don't have PHP on my system, and prefer not to get into that.

Advice would be appreciated as this is not one of my developer's strong points.

[chazzy]

Try looking at this
http://reportman.sourceforge.net/

It's not embedded, but like MySQL it's under a general public use license.

[ginahoy]

Try looking at this
http://reportman.sourceforge.net/

It's not embedded, but like MySQL it's under a general public use license.
Thanks for your response, but this looks a bit over my head. First, I'm not sure what you mean by 'not embedded' and also, there's no indication in the docs that it's compatible with MYSQL.

I checked my hosting control panel and I can export data in the following formats: SQL, CSV, Excel, Open Document Text, and Open Document Spreadsheet.

Rather than having to manually log in and download data each time, I prefer a tool that could directly access the MYSQL database on the hosting server and get whatever data it needs when I run a report.

[chazzy]

http://reportman.sourceforge.net/doc/features.html
Look under supported database engines.

Are you a developer?

[ginahoy]

Are you a developer?
No, not a developer, but a graduate-degreed engineer so I *should* be able to figure out this stuff :D

I built a multi-page website to sell my home, but that experience was enough to let me to know I didn't need to be spending my time learning how to build more complex websites.

The current website is a B2B website to support my consulting business. I'm a building systems engineer and my clients are home builders and energy raters. To initiate a project, the client will log in and answer several dozen questions about the home (in addition to sending floor plans) so I can properly set up a building simulation model. The primary report I need to create is a formatted presentation of all the data entered for a given project that my CAD technician will refer to while building the model. I can imagine wanting to create many other reports in the course of business.

Report Manager appears to be a good solution... I just didn't dig past the first link you provided. But it is clearly targeted at developers. I'll take a look at the docs to see if I can understand them :)

thanks!

[chazzy]

Most reporting tools are meant to be developer tools. If you look at Crystal Reports, it's clearly designed for developers who can do VB or SQL or Java/JDBC, or other languages. Even though they do a lot of the front end, the business rules around the back are all based on different languages.

[lacKailey]

thanks for the helpful information