Over the many years we have been writing reports for clients in UniBasic, we have never seen the requirements that all reports need to be in PDF or XLSX format. Historically, all of our reports have been written in UniBasic code and outputted to the web. Our users then could change the output from HTML to PDF with a free tool. We would even add UniBasic code so our reports could be outputted to CSV format that could be converted to XLSX. That worked for about 10 years but every time we sit down with a client for a new report they only want it in either PDF or XLSX.
At U2logic we build tools using Eclipse IDE. We had looked at Business Intelligence Reporting Tool (BIRT) many years ago to give us access to a tool that used by over 2.5 million programmers with over 47,000 active members in their community. Within BIRT is an open data access (ODA) way we could have BIRT talk to our database with normalizing the data. We build an ODA driver that takes either a query statement or can call a UniBasic subroutine to get the data necessary for BIRT to work.
We have converted around 75 reports to date using BIRT and our XLr8Reporter module in Eclipse IDE. What we found surprising was that we saved code while giving our users the report formats the wanted. The total code saved so far is around 20,000 lines but our reports are fully functional and look great. The other benefit is that when our clients want to move data around the report or add break totals, it takes us minutes instead of hours. We have never had a problem with a report not footing correctly because BIRT handles all of this.
Very few times in our coding experience have we had a win-win when we add new technology.
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