>>>Is there a common technique for generating printed reports from a web app? Would it be best to generate an html page and let the user simply print the page? or is it possible to automate Word and Excel and use them as the report engine? What about running a VFP report? Would this require a COM dll?
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>>>Thanks
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>>There are lots of ways to generate reports from a web app.
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>>Personally I use the VS2005 or 2008 ReportViewer control to define a report which is then presented to the user. The user has the option to switch to PDF or XLS format (and you programatically can set the default format).
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>>You can also do this from SQL 2005 Reporting services. this has more options, and you can allow users to define their own reports based on datasets you pre-define.
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>>2 of probably thousands of ways to do reports..
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>Thanks Bill
>I don't have VS so that's not an option. I'll ck into the other. It may be available on our web server. Do you know the answers to the specific questions I asked?
>- DF

I'm sure you could automate Word or Excel and have them create html or native output for web reports. That sounds kind of complicated to me (which is why I haven't tried).

Generating an html report page programmatically is certainly do-able, although again that seems like reinventing the wheel. Having the user print the html page directly could leave you with lots of print issues as well.

A sneaky way to publish a VFP report would be to print to HTML or PDF. A library like XFRX would make that fairly painless for a COM application.

SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services are pretty powerful and customizable, but it is designed for SQL Server data. If that is what you have, then even SQLExpress (free) has reporting services.