Calle Hedberg wrote: >One of our applications - a "Web Pivot Reporter" that functionally mimicks >Excel Pivot tables in a browser environments
Very interesting. Can you tell us more about your implemention of it and how/where it is used now that your people have had more time to learn it? What does it look like? Do you add a special row or column for the pivoting or href links from the individual data values, or something else? Is the logic all server-side or is there extensive javascript? > - was initially rejected by >many users due to messed up lay-out as soon as the dynamically created >"pivot tables" extended over several pages. Their primary requirement was >that reports should be easy to print, since they in general prefer to deal >with information on paper and not on screen. Some users certainly prefer paper, but that is fading as on-screen display of data becomes more conveniently accessible and richly interactive and as users become more accustomed to it. >I presume many others have faced similar problems - anybody know of FOSS >solutions that are simple and robust without requiring a lot of fiddling by >users? Our dynamically generated tables all have a page size limit (user controllable) that determines the maximum number of rows of data to be displayed per page and a continuation link as needed to view the next page. In addition to providing an easy means for users to avoid page overflow when printing, this helps to prevent long delays and wasted processing in delivering potentially huge tables that users might not really want. A simple trick that might help indirectly is to optionally change the content-type of a generated table from text/html to something associated with your user's spreadsheet application. For instance, we have found that for Excel users, changing the content-type of HTML tables to application/msexcel causes them to be opened as spreadsheets directly in Excel. --------------------------------------- Jim Self Systems Architect, Lead Developer VMTH Computer Services, UC Davis (http://www.vmth.ucdavis.edu/us/jaself)
