Minimizing the pain in implementing printable reports

Question

How do you minimize the pain in your development process when it comes to reporting?

For web frameworks, there is a pretty straightforward way to both produce content as well as graphically design it; content is represented semantically through HTML, and the design is separately specified through CSS. And browsers are fairly consistent with how they render the output (and the inconsistencies are well-known and can be planned for). There are even WYSIWYG editors to help out less-CSS-savvy graphical designers.

But what do we do about print content?

At one company, I created a process that worked like this: A script generated a semantic representation through XML. The XML was passed through XSLT to generate an XML-FO document. Then, this was passed to another tool (Apache FOP, I believe) to generate a PDF. This worked well for that company.

At this company, however, output appearance matters to management, and we have a graphical designer. Currently, we are using a reporting tool (XtraReports from Developer Express, version 8.1). It isn't bad; it outputs to a variety of formats, has a WYSIWYG designer, reports are implemented through C# classes, and it supports data binding to data sets (unfortunately, not POCO's). However, we have some major pain points with this setup:

• The reporting framework has major limitations on how you can lay out and group your reporting bands
• Presentable elements, especially charts, lack the capabilities we need to fine-tune and achieve the look of our mock-ups.
• There is no good way to share styles and layout among reports akin to what we can get through CSS.
• Good composability of reusable parts is very hard to implement. So we end up with a lot of copy & paste inheritance of functionality; this is bad news whenever we need to make sweeping changes across all reports.

Now, maybe there's some kick-ass framework out there that can eliminate the pains of reporting frameworks, but I assume that they all have their weaknesses. Do you have a framework or process that works well for you and reduces the pain points inherent in reporting?

Answer 1

Prince XML is a really cool tool which allows you to use HTML or XML styled with CSS (including CSS paged media for printing) and generate PDFs from it.