How to produce good looking data report from my Cocoa app ?
12/07/03 19:08
I need to produce good report for my new accounting app, is there any available tool easy to integrate with Cocoa ?
Writing complex report from ground-up for business applications is not an easy job…
Several commercial applications have good reporting capabilities 4D, FileMaker, OmnisStudio, etc.
But what if you write you own business application in Cocoa and want not only good looking reports but also access to classic functionalities like sum of column, running sums, grouping of rows, automatic grouping of group header with at least N rows on the same page, etc. ?
There are some solutions:
first, you can write your report with a commercial application, lets say FileMaker (it's easy to use, and relatively cheap) and send your data to it: export to a csv file and launch a script in a FileMaker database that will import the data and print it…
Easy to realize, quick path to the solution, … May justify itself if customers already have FM or want to be able to easily modify themselves the reports you provide to them…
If you want a standalone solution this first option is not a definitive one. You may want to look at professionnal packages like ReportWell, Big Faceless target="_blank", etc.
There are also some OpenSource projects of interest like DataVision, …
Here is an example of how to integrate DataVision which is written in Java to a Objective-C program: DataVision Cocoa Wrapper
Several commercial applications have good reporting capabilities 4D, FileMaker, OmnisStudio, etc.
But what if you write you own business application in Cocoa and want not only good looking reports but also access to classic functionalities like sum of column, running sums, grouping of rows, automatic grouping of group header with at least N rows on the same page, etc. ?
There are some solutions:
first, you can write your report with a commercial application, lets say FileMaker (it's easy to use, and relatively cheap) and send your data to it: export to a csv file and launch a script in a FileMaker database that will import the data and print it…
Easy to realize, quick path to the solution, … May justify itself if customers already have FM or want to be able to easily modify themselves the reports you provide to them…
If you want a standalone solution this first option is not a definitive one. You may want to look at professionnal packages like ReportWell, Big Faceless target="_blank", etc.
There are also some OpenSource projects of interest like DataVision, …
Here is an example of how to integrate DataVision which is written in Java to a Objective-C program: DataVision Cocoa Wrapper