Blueprint for Reporting/Charting

We need to be able to generate Pretty & Informative Reports from the database.

For quick visualisations in the browser, we have included ​jqPlot.

For more formal reports (which can also be retrieved via webservices using the PDF representation of the REST Controller), we currently use ​ReportLab via ​Geraldo. This also supports Graphics (via ​PIL)

Other options:

• ​http://www.reynoldsftw.com/2009/02/6-jquery-chart-plugins-reviewed/
  • Recommends ​Flot: "From an interaction perspective, Flot by far will get you as close as possible to Flash graphing as you can get with jQuery."
• ​Pisa uses ​ReportLab to generate PDF from HTML
• ​jsPDF uses pure JavaScript to create PDFs
• Use S3XRC & hence XSLT to generate XML-FO which can be converted to PDF
  • ​http://xmlgraphics.apache.org/fop/
  • ​http://pypi.python.org/pypi/zopyx.convert/
  • ​Recommend ReportLab over FOP

• ​Matplotlib can generate visualisations
• ​Cairo can generate nice charts from the back-end
• ​Pod to create Open Document Format

Excel files are currently written using ​xlwt. Other options:

• ​PyExcelerator
• Docs on Python Excel libraries: ​http://www.python-excel.org/
• Thread recommending xlwt: ​http://groups.google.com/group/web2py/browse_thread/thread/375307e92df40ca8

T2 includes a basic barchart function:

def barchart(data,width=400,height=15,scale=None,
             label_width=50,values_width=50):
    if not scale: scale=max([m for n,c,m in data])
    if not scale: return None
    return TABLE(_class='barchart',
           *[TR(TD(n,_width=label_width,_style="text-align: right"),
           TABLE(TR(TD(_width=int(m*width/scale),_height=height,
           _style='background-color:'+c))),TD(m,_width=values_width),
           _style="vertical-alignment: middle") for n,c,m in data])

Could be something to use Flash? (although best-avoided, if possible, to minimise client support)

• PyAMF: ​http://pyamf.org
  • Web2Py integration: ​http://mdp.cti.depaul.edu/AlterEgo/default/show/22
• BirdEye: ​http://code.google.com/p/birdeye/
• FusionCharts Free: ​http://www.fusioncharts.com/Free/
• Open Flash Chart: ​http://teethgrinder.co.uk/open-flash-chart-2/
  • from Python: ​http://code.google.com/p/open-flash-chart-python/

S2 version:

• ​http://wiki.sahanafoundation.org/doku.php?id=dev:reportinglib

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BluePrints