How do you minimize pain during the development process when it comes to reporting?
For web frameworks, there is a fairly simple way for both creating content and for graphically designing it; content is presented semantically via HTML, and the design is separately defined through CSS. And browsers are quite consistent with how they output the result (and discrepancies are well known and can be planned). There are even WYSIWYG editors to help less savvy CSS-oriented designers.
But what do we do with print content?
In one company, I created a process that worked as follows: a script generated a semantic representation via XML. XML was passed through XSLT to create an XML-FO document. This was then transferred to another tool (Apache FOP, I suppose) to create the PDF file. It worked well for this company.
In this company, however, appearance is important to management, and we have a graphic designer. We are currently using a reporting tool (XtraReports from Developer Express, version 8.1). It's not bad; it is output in various formats, has a WYSIWYG constructor, reports are implemented through C # classes and supports data binding to data sets (unfortunately, not POCO). However, we have a few major pain points with this setting:
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