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Report Development
- Details
- Category: Uncategorised
- Published on Wednesday, 04 May 2011 09:47
- Written by Super User
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Our client needed the ability to generate reports cheaply and efficiently from the data in an existing MIS application without resorting to a complex data warehouse application.
The Brief
The client had been using Microsoft Access Reports started from their java based MIS system. The different versions of Microsoft Office used within the company meant this was a fairly unreliable solution.
The client needed a reporting system that would be cheap, flexible and easy to use. At the same time it needed to integrate better with the existing MIS system
Our Approach
After some research we chose the open source reporting package iReport to replace the Access Reporting engine as this could be more closely integrated with the existing Java MIS system. It also removed the need for an installation of Microsoft Access on every desktop.
The reports were integrated into the java application seemless displaying the result to the user using the Jasper Reports viewer.
These reports used the MIS applications Java components rather an ODBC connection to access the data held in the companies SQL Server database. Alterations to the MIS application so that it acquired its data via a Web Service rather than an JDBC connection made it possible for staff outside of the main company offices to access the reports whilst connected to the database over the internet.
The success of this approach lead to staff asking for additional reports to produce standard letters. This removed the need to type letters in Word and cut/paste information from the MIS application.
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