Published:
24 Apr 2009
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Abstract
This introductory look at reporting clearly establishes what a reporting solution is, how reports differ from documents, and why you should adopt a reporting solution for your organization. Delivering business critical reports has never been more important, and this white paper explains the why, what, and how of Reporting Solutions you need to get the job done. |
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by Telerik
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Introduction |
There is no question about it: global economic times are
tough right now. Businesses are faced with increasing pressure to find ways to
optimize their operations and “tighten their belts” to continue delivering
value and making a profit. Surviving these times and continuing to grow your
business requires that you fully understand the way your business is operating.
It requires that you have the right information at the right time to make
important business decisions.
The key to delivering that information to business decision
makers in a timely fashion is reports. Reports are something everybody has
heard of before, and they are ubiquitous in most business environments. Usually,
the term “report” is used to describe any document or display that contains
data, but when you start talking about “reporting,” a report has a more
specific definition that can sometimes be difficult to understand.
In this quick introductory look at reporting, we’ll try to
clearly establish what a reporting solution is, how reports differ from
documents, why you should adopt a reporting solution for your organization, and
how Telerik’s Reporting
solution is the perfect fit for delivering the business critical reports
you need.
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Why are reporting solutions important? |
With the advent of modern computer workflows, most
businesses are collecting tons of “information” about their operations.
Research, however, shows that most of this information fails to deliver any
real value to the business because it is not being transformed into
“knowledge.”
Taking data from simple “information” to “knowledge”
requires analytics, or the application of some understanding of the data to
highlight issues, trends, and changes in the data that are relevant to business
decisions. This is one of the primary roles filled by reporting solutions.
Reporting solutions- via the reports they generate- encapsulate the rules
required to understand business information and turn it in to knowledge.
Businesses that don’t engage in this process are literally
leaving money on the table and failing to maximize the effectiveness of their
business. In a recent InformationWeek article on the state of business
intelligence- another encompassing term for “reporting solutions”- the magazine
reveals that some companies are even using reporting to help drive business
success by exposing to employees reports tied to incentive pay. The reports
aggregate key business performance metrics and employees can easily track
their impact on business performance through well designed and easy to access
reports, driving them to record performance.
Failure to adopt a reporting solution means that your
business is not only losing money due to missed opportunity, but you’re also
wasting money expending more effort than you should creating and recreating
reports for different users in different environments.
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What can I do with reporting solutions? |
Within the “reporting” space, reports are primary concerned
with transforming business data into a format that enables business analysts to
understand the condition of the business and make informed decisions based on
that condition. While simple reporting can be done with tools like data grids,
reporting solutions offer much more flexibility and power to present data
wherever it’s needed- be that in a Windows application or a web application.
By logically combining reporting objects, organizations
receive unprecedented ways to view their business performance and to analyze
the information in the most efficient manner. Reporting gives the ability to
create reports containing any number of report objects - charts, cross tabs,
and lists, as well as non-reporting components such as styling, images, and
text. These objects allow you to create fairly simple data views such as
invoices and inventory reports, or more advanced data dashboards. Their true
power however lies in the ability to add calculations for creating forecasts,
to filter data in order to see the organization’s performance for a particular
period of time, and even to conditionally format data to highlight the most
important information.
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How do reporting solutions work? |
All reporting solutions ultimately put information (data),
layout (report definition), and analytics (logic) in one place to produce a
report, which can be reviewed in a Windows or web environment, and exported to
various document formats (such as PDF, Excel, and Word).
A report, in the context of reporting solutions, is a report
definition (see Fig. 1). The report definition specifies the connections to the
data source, as well as the layouts and styles used to present the data.
Layouts define the structure and rules of the data representation, and styles
define how data will look once retrieved.
Fig 1: Data Items are fed to reports and then
output to static documents
The report definition does not deal with data directly,
because data is not live. The report has to be processed and rendered in order
to view data. The report definition is simply a template, a static layout which
rarely changes, and which (much like templates) has the characteristic to produce
content with consistent look and feel across all report sections.
Although reports do not work with data directly, the report
author has to have good knowledge of the data, as well as the tools to create
nice looking and helpful reports. Here is where the reporting solution comes in
– it deals with the report layout, styling, and report processing. The layout
and styling are created in a special tool, called report designer, to produce
the report template, which is filled with data during the report rendering
process to produce the final report. The report can be run at any time and it
will show the latest state of the data stored.
Another perspective on how reporting solutions work is to
view the report as a repeater. Like repeaters, which
are used to display a repeated list of data, a report displays data by applying
“rules” (or “templates”) to the data and then rendering that data in a layout
that’s ultimately designed to be printed. Also like repeaters, individual data
items rendered in a report cannot be altered. The templates are defined and
then applied to all data items the same way (see Fig. 1).
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Report characteristics |
A report can generally be characterized as having these
qualities:
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Its layout is based on a set of “rules” and those rules are consistently
applied to data pulled from a data store (such as a database, collection of
business objects, XML files, etc.)
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Its layout (or ”template”) is created first with no data, and
then data is automatically added to the report at “run time” (or at the point
the report is viewed)
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Its data is pulled from a data store based on some type of query.
That is, the data in the report is the result of a data query and it is not
added manually by designers or users when the report is designed
·
Its layout is “paper oriented,” or designed with printing in
mind. That means page breaks, page margins, and page sizes are all considered
when design and rendering a report.
·
It can apply analytics (or “expressions”) to the data to make the
data easier for business users to consume
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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
Documents can be produced many ways, including:
·
Manually (in a program like Word or Excel)
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Automatically (with a program like a documentation creator or PDF
creator)
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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.
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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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How do I add reporting to my project? |
So, if you accept that reporting is important, the key is
finding a reporting solution that easily adapts to your business and does not
disrupt your existing business processes. You need a tool that is both powerful
and easy to use so that the cost of implementing reporting does not outstrip
its value to your business.
The best way to add reporting to your projects is Telerik .Net
Reporting solution, a full-featured reporting solution from the .NET tool
experts at Telerik. Not all reporting solutions are created equal, though, and
Telerik’s unique approach to reporting makes it easier than ever to start
transforming business data in to knowledge with little to no learning curve.
Among the unique
features found in Telerik
Reporting are:
·
An innovative Visual Studio-integrated report designer that
blends the rich layout functions of drawing applications with the power of a
report generator
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Easy to use analysis tools that enable you to apply analytics to
data without writing any code
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Powerful wizards that can automatically create and design report
layouts
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Great flexibility to control the report behavior and connect it
to any data source in your organization
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Rich report viewers that are easy to add to any WebForms or
WinForms application, with full support for exporting to all popular document
formats (like Word, PDF, TIFF, and MHTML)
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Simple and affordable licensing
Telerik’s Reporting
tool makes it easy to add essential reporting functionality to any .NET
application. There is no need to continue wasting time manually creating Word
or PDF reports, or struggling with HTML to layout your reports for the web.
With Telerik
Reporting, you can have rich, visual reports that are easy to add to any
ASP.NET or WinForms application designed and deployed within minutes of getting
started.
Reporting is an essential activity found in all successful
businesses, and Telerik Reporting is the essential tool you need to build and
deliver your reports. Experience is the best proof, though, and free trials of
Telerik Reporting are available to make that possible. Download the trials,
discover the how easy it is to create reports, and begin delivering the value
reporting provides to your business today!
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