building reports from scratch

[tamayo]

Hi, I'm developing an ERP in LAMP, currently focused in the Human Resource part, so, I need to print several reports such as ID cards, employees profile, certified salary forms, etc. so I want to code the reports from scratch because i've heard that for performances is better and also some IDE's are not enough flexible, for example in different paper size. So, before start I have several questions, here they are:

1. is possible to print images files? I mean like a company header

2. is possible to print directly the information needed to the printer or is a better practice to send it to a pdf file first?

3. do you know a way to control the max lines for a letter page?

4. in your opinion is a good approach to code the reports from scratch or is better to use an IDE? how do you solve this topic? always thinking in performance of course.

As you can see i'm very newbie in this part, in fact I've never coded a report like I need, usually in the past I sent the data to excel but in this case I can't do this because the system has not to be excel dependent and some reports doesn't fit in an excel format. So I don't want from you how to code them, I want your advices how to choose the best approach to solve this thing. thanks a lot

All the best

tamayo

[big_nerd]

tamayo,

That is one heck of a project undertaking, and I wish you the best of luck with it!

Anything to do with printing on the CLIENT side would be CSS/HTML, etc, in which case:

1. Of course, its html
2. Printing from CSS "print" media is perfect, PDF is nice for portability and/or if you want to avoid Internet Explorer/Firefox Header Print(s)
3. There are methods for BOTH PDF and CSS for Page-Breaks, rather than max lines per page (which you can control with PHP).
4. An IDE is an Integrated Development Environment, if you are thinking of a reporting tool, to be completely honest a reporting tool has thousands of pain steaking hours put into building them, they will be fast, and accurate.

The download to pre-made reporting tools is they try to be too generic, or have a steep (for some) cleaning curve, as they expect to be run by a Business/HR Analyst (in general).

When you develop your own reports, you can tailor what exact reports you need and - with that, cut down on time, but a lot of effort will go into the development of it.

If you want to send prints directly to printer on the server side, I have to ask, why not just write a client application to handle everything with the data being kept on the server side?