PHP, MySQL and Reports

Wondering if anyone has some suggestions for a solution to producing reports from MySQL, using PHP, or a tool to create and include reports into PHP.

While Crystal reports seems frequently used for .NET and Java platforms, it doesn't seem to feature on PHP driven sites.

Any thoughts?

Cheers, Max Hugen
Australia

what kind of reports do you wnt PHP to produce?

Application reports. I'm thinking about how to convert an application written in MS Access, to PHP/MySQL. It has a lot of reports, some a bit complex with data pulled in from many tables via subforms etc.

From what I understand, php is capable of accessing a ms access database. But that Access was not meant to handle the number of requests that a mysql database can.
Silk

My website

Perhaps I didn't make it very clear, but the Access application would be rewritten into PHP, with data in MySQL.

Did find one reporting tool called RLIB. It seems aimed at LAMP environments, and is open source. Has anyone tried it?

I think I understand what you mean now. Microsoft Access is capable of generating reports relatively easily (more easily than Oracle Form Builder, for example), but you want similar functionality for the LAMP environment.

I'm not aware of any software that can simulate Microsoft Access reports, but if you learn the SQL syntax properly you should be able to generate any dataset you wish, and thus any report you wish. It is simply a matter of building a web page to display the dataset in the way you want.

I agree with scjessey.

Recently I played around the MS Access application. I also tried Access report tools. It is helpful to report the databases. (I respect the person who invented this)

There is no default reporting tools in MySQL. Howerver, it is not difficult to generate the reports by yourselves. If you are familiar with SQL queries, you can create a PHP page to achieve it easily.

Hmmm... we write some involved reports in Access, with often several complex SQL queries, several levels of grouping, several subreports, heaps of calculated fields which sometimes use data from more than one subform, etc.

I have no doubt that this can be constructed in PHP, but as we'd have to build the equivalent of a reporting engine to construct so many reports, I'm not sure we'd achieve this '"easily". :-)

Two report tools/engines I've found are DataVision (Java based), and RLIB. Both are open source.

RLIB has hooks for PHP, but no design interface (GUI). DataVision is meant to be used in a J2EE environment, although maybe PHP could still use it.

I guess I was hoping for a reply to my post such as "oh yeah, we all use [some_fab_engine], it's easy, has a GUI, and great community support". Don't want much, do I?

Cheers, Max

coincidentily I am doing the same search you are except that I'm trying to move from crystal reports to something that will work with LAMP. You mentioned rlib and data vision, so far (and I've been searching on and off for a while now) they may be the not perfect solutions we might have to settle on.
rlib
project doesn't look to be very active but some existing users but they did respond quickly to a support email.
datavision
seems to be a kludge to keep it pure lamp, really meant for tomcat and I'm not sure what I would be getting into.
anyway drop me an email if you want to bounce these or other options around.
Myself I need to decide soon and start converting.
Good Luck

Well missed the include email piece,
bill(at)kruchas(dot)com

As you point out, RLIB doesn't look like it has a substantial user group. Also, I'm not sure it can cope with subreports, which are essential for me with the sort of management reports we'd need to produce.

DataVision actually seems to fit the requirements of a report engine better. Has subreports and it offers a GUI as well. However, its Java of course, so that's not helping me much at the moment.

Indeed, in considering LAMP as a platform for migrating business applications to the Internet, reports are shaping up as a major stumbling block.