A possible future project (we are looking into loads of possible future projects so questions like this might flood the forums for a while) is to take a deep look at our reports and lists.
Today we have two types of reports:
* Lists and reports created on the fly by users from a Windows based graphical client. We use an older version of VPE (Virtual Print Engine) for this.
* Lists and reports created by batches on our server (Linux environment). These are 99% pdfs created by PDFInclude. Some of these pdfs are e-mailed on the fly.
Nothings really wrong with VPE or PDFInclude but quite a lot of the reports are basically the same so if the VPE report is updated we might have to update the PDF version as well.
How do you do things like this? Crystal Reports? Of course one product that could fulfill both printing and pdf creating would be nice. A graphical editor for designing reports as well as template support would also be good.
List & Label from www.combit.net Supports reports and PDF creation and a graphical report designer that you can embed into your application.
It's based either on a DLL or .NET interfaces and comes with Sports DB based Progress sample code.
Of course no Linux solution, but great on Windows. Works in batch mode as well.
The really key issue here is your requirements. There are any number of solutions to which you could migrate that would handle all versions of reports. The question is, what does "all versions" mean.
I did a very nice setup for one customer some years ago using Actuate. It was built on a structure where the ABL function put a report request into a database table and a small ABL client on the Actuate server queried that table and fired off requests to the Actuate engine. In some complex cases, the ABL function would create a dataset on disk and pass the file name to the report table.
There were a couple things about that structure which were exceptional. One was that I have not seen any product that could equal Actuate for being able to produce just *exactly* any kind of complex output which was superb for certain applications like their royalty statements. The ROI was immediate and obvious in reduced calls from authors trying to figure out their statements. Another was that the facilities included a repository. This meant that not only was there a permanent, readily accessible image of every report, which could be easily output as PDF (think copies of invoices without reprinting), but that there were a lot of reports which we didn't print at all. Something like a Sales Journal had potentially critical information if one was trying to trace something down, but there was no value in looking at it every day. We created a function that allowed an existing ABL report to print to disk and then passed the disk file name to a function in Actuate which produced a green bar like image of the plain ABL report. We called it Treesaver. There was also an option to physically print just the last page, which was where totals and errror messages would appear.
So, a lot depends on your imagination, how fancy you want your output, how much work you are willing to do to reinvent existing reports, and how clever you are at using the tools available.
Some Java reporting engines that you can consider: Birt, Jasper Reports, Pentaho... all does support document generation, printing, preview and have a nice graphical report designer. As for integrating it with Progress you might check out some of our projects on www.ganimede.ro... still a work on progress but it will allow you to:
1. start the report engine form ABL for print, document generation - print preview for graphical environment, including linux
2. use you ABL queries or business logic to produce the data report, no need to bother with SQL
I use abl code to generate html or tab delimited files depending on what the user wants. The html can produce reasonably 'pretty' reports. The tab delimited files can be loaded into a spreadsheet (Yuk). You can also cheat in windows by changing the filename suffix as html seems to be readable by most word processors and spread sheets.