Does anyone know of a database or library that we can use in Notes to produce standard, dynamic reports?
I have a requirement to produce some reports out of Notes. This is pretty standard columnar style report and not just the printing of a document or form. I need to be able to define headers, footers and detail data, and of course, it needs to be able to print the header(s) and footer(s) on all pages.
I have developed the report via IntelliPrint, but due to some installation issues our network engineering folks are having with IntelliPrint, management is asking for me to research other options. Management claims that IBM has said that we can do what we are needing to do within Notes without any third-party applications. So, does anyone know of a database or library that we can use in Notes to produce standard, dynamic reports?
Yes, I have downloaded and looked at the Notes Reconn application. It produces great bar graphs but not columnar reports. I left a question for help, there also.
Someone has also told me about a new product call iText (Entreprenerd — The Book about iText). It is an Eclipse/Java tool. I am checking it out.
Notes Reconn does generate Standard Column Reports in Excel. You have the option of selecting to use field names as the header or you can define your own field labels.
You have already downloaded Notes Reconn so please use the configuration called “Demo Case 01-1 - Basic” to see a very simple report in columns. This will export data from your personal names.nsf to Excel.
Notes Reconn cannot print Headers/Footers on each page unless you create an Excel template with this page setup and attach it to Notes Reconn. Notes Reconn can then write data to that Excel template. If the focus of the report is printing then you may want to look at Crystal Reports. This is a commercial reporting tool that is powerful but very involved. It is a lot of work setting up the report. However you do get a pixel perfect reports that format on the page exactly like you want - with headers/footers/page numbers/titles etc.
If there’s any reason to print the reports, then an all-Notes solution is probably not the best option. (If it’s just for viewing, Notes can produce a pretty decent report, but printing is not, never has been, and probably never will be Notes’ strong suit.)
That doesn’t mean, though, that you need to rely on a third-party report-generating application to produce the reports – as long as you have an application that’s more amenable to printing in order to view and print the reports. Depending on what’s required, creating the report in Excel (simple columnar data) or Word (more extensive summary text to go with the tables) or the equivalent (like OpenOffice.org or Symphony) is probably the best bet. There is plenty of code here and on OpenNTF.org that can help you create the report in Excel or Word.
If you’d like to consider a 3rd party tool we have a Lotus Notes / Domino export utility which exports Notes document data and / or view column data to the following formats:* MS-Excel
MS-Word
MS-Access
PDF
HTML
XML
CSV
Fixed Width
And other character delimited files
You can export whole documents, selected fields, views and view column data. Selection criteria & formulas can be specified to control which documents / data you want to export. Exports may be scheduled as well.
For more information and to download a copy go to the following page:
Single user license costs less than an hour of your time.
The ReportGenerator class on openntf.org will do a good bit of what you want, maybe all depending what kind of header and footer you want. The Form properties of a Notes form let you define a header and footer, which you could use, but that’s fairly minimal – you can include some static text and a page number, but not a repeat of the column headings, for instance.
If you can do what you want with a spreadsheet, then Exporting from Notes documents to spreadsheets (without an export view) will show you how to populate data into a pre-designed spreadsheet, which you can then print or view. For Excel, this relies on OLE automation, but for OpenOffice there’s a back-end API you can use.
It’s probably true that you can do what you want with Notes alone. Given sufficient time and effort Notes can do just about anything. But that doesn’t make it a good idea or cost-effective.