Seeking reporting or templating tool to generate large formatted PDF reports from dataset
- by Mr. Tacos
Say I have some data in MySQL or a big ole CSV file. I also have a report. It's a PDF, call it 100 pages long. I need to generate variations on this PDF for slices of the data. More specific example:
I have a CSV file with each StackOverflow user in a row and each column contains various statistics about that user.
I have a report called "Your StackOverflow Performance". Its got lots of text, always the same, but each section contains something like: "You Vs. The Average StackOverflow Poster on this metric". I want a table that appears there that has the average data, which is the same in every run of the PDF, in one column. In the second column, I want your data, which is different for each PDF/row in the CSV file/user of StackOverflow.
I'm pretty sure people use things like Crystal for this? Is there something in MS SQL Server that's good for this? An open source template language? I'm not even really sure if what I need is called a 'reporting' tool (since I don't really need to do any crunching, the data in this case is being crunched by a series of scripts and SPSS, I don't need bands and subbands and so on) or 'templating'. Is there even such a thing as templating PDFs?
Natch, I'd be fine with something that generates output easily scriptable to PDF, like eps, but not something like HTML. The report formatting is fussy and done and externally determined and handed down from on high. It's print-oriented, not webby.
Thanks in advance.
