Hi John,

I don't have a magic bullet when it comes to creating dynamic reports over the Internet. In a sense my app is built on reports rendered in HTML. All the html forms and records displayed are really html forms/reports. The html is enclosed within double quotes and a perl print command streams the HTML to the client's browser. It seem like there should be a easier way, but I'm still looking.

If the reports weren't needed by folks surfing the www, you could use a tool like VFP to connect to the database, grab the desired records into a cursor, and generate a report with the VFP report writer. I've seen many tools that convert VFP report to other formats like word docs, PDF docs, html docs, etc, but the last time I looked, everything was still pretty shaky in the web reports area. You might do a goggle on “report writers” to see if there is something that might work.

So far as my shopping cart app is concerned, it looks like I'll be taking the results return from db queries and phrasing it into html, so the web surfers can print it. Html really leave a lot to be desired in the area of reports, like not being able to do a clean page break, or otherwise lay out the reports in a definite structure, but I haven't seen any other web sites using anything more advanced.

It seem like I'm limited to either html reports, or static reports like pdf reports based on images.

I spent this afternoon taking a closer look at the perl Oops model, so I haven't gotten back into Java. I wish I could help, but you will figure it out soon enough. The advantage that Jave provides is it does render dynamic graphics over the Internet, which is nice, especially for the gurus that need to be playing with the really cool stuff. Perl and php are basically text or graphic images, which isn't the latest or greatest, but it get the job done for business apps.

Regards,

LelandJ