Reporting 101: Understanding the Why, What, and How of Reporting Solutions
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by Telerik
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What isn’t a report?

Sometimes it helps to understand what a report is by also understanding what a report is not.  It’s easy to confuse the reports that reporting solutions generate with other types of business reports, and even documents, so it’s important clarify what a generated report is not designed to do.

Generally speaking, a report is not:

·         A Word or Excel document. Unlike reports, documents are “snapshots” of static data. They are sources of data and not consumers of data.  Once the report renders, its static output becomes a document! Figure 2 below helps illustrate this concept.

Fig 2: Data flows to reports and then exports to static documents

Telerik .net Reporting solution
Documents can be produced many ways, including:

·         Manually (in a program like Word or Excel)

·         Automatically (with a program like a documentation creator or PDF creator)

·         By a reporting tool!

A document is the final static output of a report and it is a read-only perspective of the source data.

·         Intended to be a flexible page designer. A report can be very flexible and render many types of report items (for instance, tables, charts, barcodes, images, shapes, and text), but it will render those items according to the report definition. You cannot, for instance, insert an item in one place on a report page unless you intended to insert that item on every page in the report in the same place.

·         A data grid. Data grids, while great tools for displaying data, do not offer the analytics that reports do and they are not designed in a “paper oriented” manner. Data grids are also hard to move between environments (such as windows and web applications), unlike a report definition that can be shared between many environments.

·         A report does not require every page be manually “designed” (as you would do with a Word document). A report instead uses template rules and renders data according to those rules on every page of the report.

To summarize, reporting solutions define the queries that are used to retrieve data, as well as the layouts and styles (report definitions) used to present the data into a report.


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