The Importance of Implementing Reporting
Businesses need to be able to store their data, but they also want to obtain information from the system to track and monitor various aspects of the business, such as performance, cash flow, forecasts, sales vs. targets, and so on. An ideal means of achieving this is by implementing reporting functionality in the application.
A report generally consists of data retrieved from one or more databases inserted into a predefined template—often with some sort of intermediate processing to turn the data into useful information. Reports can range from the extremely simple to the extremely complex, but both follow the same workflow from an application perspective. At runtime, data is
- Extracted from the database
- Passed through to the report generator/writer, which processes the data and formats the results in a human-readable form suitable for printing
The complexity of processing the data, populating the report, and formatting the results is handled by the reporting engine using the rules defined in the template.
Note Users won't always want to have to produce reports for information that they regularly monitor but don't print—this functionality is probably better implemented within an application dashboard. Therefore, reports are most appropriately used when printing is required (which it is in most line-of-business applications). This means that whatever your solution for displaying reports in Silverlight, it must also include the ability to print them.
Examples of simple reports include invoices and data printouts, which require minimal processing and generally just insert data from a database directly into the report. More complex reporting may involve mining the data in the database to determine patterns or relationships (correlations) between various data points or to create predictive models on which management can base its ongoing tactics and help determine future strategies. Some reports may take some time to produce when a lot of processing is required, and if generating reports places a high load on the web server, you should consider offloading the processing to a separate dedicated server, such as SQL Server Reporting Services. In summary, reporting helps enable business intelligence and knowledge management from within your line-of-business application.