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coldfusioncoldfusion-11
Advance Software
Advance Software

Reputation: 73

ColdFusion Report Building

Forgive me if I have missed something but here is what I seem to think about ColdFusion report builder after reviewing the latest ColdFusion 11 release.

  1. The v11 is the same as v10.

  2. Report Builder hasn't changed really since it was first released.

  3. It still isn't available for anything other than windows even though ColdFusion and the popular IDES for ColdFusion are cross platform.

So with that I can't help wonder:

What exactly does Adobe want you to use for building reports within ColdFusion? Are they really wanting us to use something else? Maybe Jasper?

If I have a Mac then are they saying that even though they have a product (ColdFusion) that is developed to run on a Mac (because they want Mac users to use it I guess) then you can't develop reports.

What have I missed?

Upvotes: 2

Views: 1027

Answers (2)

UGnesh
UGnesh

Reputation: 1

In my current legacy ColdFusion project, we have had lots of compatibility issues while working on Word, PDF Web and Excel report generation especially as our project was strictly IE11. We were using ColdFusion Version 11 and CF Report Builder 10. One area we found it be useful was we needn't have separate code for Word , PDF and Web Reports. And one single block of code was enough to 3 or more format reports. Especially PDF reports when used with CFDOCUMENT tag was causing carriage return, alignment issues. And Table format never really reflected accurately with HTML on WORD document. But after using CF report builder these issues were minimized. I tested a few reports using .CFR format to create PDF and Word. These reports are not accurate to scale but they were consistent across the formats PDF and WORD types. Also the time taken to create these reports were faster than the conventional HTML tabular format, CSS route. I think the Report Builder standard would be top down (Label & Values). Because it has a set bands for Report Header, Page Header, Column Header, Column Detail, Report Footer. Other Benefits of using ADOBE REPORT BUILDER

  1. NUMERICAL Report: In future, if there is a numerical data reporting requirement And also we can make use of Grouping and various numerical calculations like Count, Sum, Average, GRAND TOTAL, VARIANCE, STANDARD DEVIATION, FIRST, LAST, Lowest, Highest etc.

  2. GRAPHICAL Reports : In future, if there is a graphical data reporting requirement Then we can also make use of the different chart types available like Bar, Line, Pie, Area, Curve charts etc. using CF Report Builder.

  3. Other PDF, RTF, EXCEL,XML,FLASH, Web reporting structures

Though it may be not sufficient but it helps with most of the client requirements.

Upvotes: 0

Adam Cameron
Adam Cameron

Reputation: 29870

Report Builder was a Macromedia product that Adobe picked up in the boot sale. As far as I can tell, they've never indicated any interest in it.

As far as "What exactly does Adobe want you to use for building reports within ColdFusion?", perhaps the answer is "they don't care". Not least of all because ColdFusion was always a server-side product, and it was a bit of a weird decision for Macromedia to developer a tangential desktop product to work with it.

I don't mean to be dismissive when I say this, I just think everyone realised Report Builder was a poorly realised idea and dead in the water when it was released.

I imagine Adobe expect one to separate out the idea of "server side" and "client side", and accordingly use [any old desktop app you like] to create your reports, and simply publish them to a web-servable format for the web server (not the ColdFusion server) to deliver.

Upvotes: 3

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