When the project manager asked me to be responsible for the development of the data display function, why did my heart reject it?

With the development of the Internet industry, all walks of life have embarked on the road of digitization. Business operations generate a large amount of data, and only when the data is summarized into reports can it produce greater value for decision-making. The types of reports are very diverse, such as the most common financial balance sheets, warehouse printouts for manufacturing, inspection reports for the pharmaceutical industry, and supermarket receipt printing for retail industries, etc., are all reports. The automatic generation of so many reports puts forward higher requirements on the report module of the software system. When the project manager asked me to be responsible for the development of the data display function, my heart always refused, because the report module needs too much attention. After a period of precipitation, my mother no longer has to worry about my studies.

From the panic

Don't panic when you have food at home!

As one of the most complex modules in the software system, the report module usually has three technical routes to choose from:

1. Self-research

2. Open source report control

3. Commercial report control

With the modularization, integration and low-code of the system, more development teams tend to choose commercial report controls and open source report controls when making technical selection of report modules. The main reason is that these two solutions can not only save development costs, but also make subsequent report maintenance and upgrades easier.

How should the development team choose the report control that suits them? As a technical support staff, we have sorted out several common problems in report selection based on our own customer service experience for your reference.

Platform selection

The platform selection is 1. Only when the platform selection is correct at the beginning, will all the subsequent work be meaningful. Before the formal report selection, we must first determine that the selected report can well meet the current framework platform. According to the framework platform, first determine the reports that meet the requirements, which can avoid detours at the beginning.

If the project is a desktop end project and there are requirements for web pages, then the report selection can choose the report control of the .Net and .Net Core platforms;

If it is a Java project, there are more choices, you can choose java report control, front-end report control, .Net report control;

If the project has a front-end framework and needs to be separated from the front-end and the back-end, it is convenient to choose the front-end report control.

Data selection

At present, the company's information construction is basically complete, and ERP, OA, finance, human resources and other systems are deeply rooted in the actual business process of the company. Different systems may have multiple sets of different relational databases such as SQL Server, Oracle, MySQL, etc., plus data files such as Excel, txt, etc. There are too many forms of data sources, whether they can support a variety of data source forms, It is an important function for evaluating the performance of reporting tools.

The second is the real-time nature of the data, whether the data refresh is real-time refresh or regular refresh. Whether the security of the data is guaranteed, these must be considered in the selection

And the most important point is that in terms of report big data support, according to your actual business needs, a stress test should be carried out under the largest amount of data to ensure that the report is previewed, exported, printed, etc. under the condition of large data volume. There will be no performance bottlenecks.

Selection of report design

Report design ability should be the key point to determine whether to buy a report in the end. Purchasing a report control is mainly to solve the ability of report design and display. Then the design ability is the core point of the entire report control. Judging whether a report control can meet the design requirements is mainly concerned. The following points:

The ease of use and flexibility of the report designer

The ease of use of report design, whether the learning cost of report designer is high, and whether business personnel can quickly get started.

Whether the learning resources of the report are abundant, and whether there is a strong technical support team that can answer our questions in real time.

The flexibility of report design, whether it provides rich APIs, and whether it is possible to customize design reports according to requirements.

Excel-like Chinese style report design ability

Chinese-style complex reports are embodied in multiple data sources, sharding, inter-row, grouping, and frozen ranks. Whether to support efficient and accurate complex header design, multi-data source reports, mixed chart reports, grouped reports and other report types, as well as table multi-level drilling, linkage and other functions is the key to verifying report tools.

Design of Word-like Document

Word-like document reports, the main consideration is whether the report can meet some of the requirements of document reports, such as headers, footers, sub-reports, image nesting, rich text, automatic page-changing and other design capabilities. When the report is displayed, it can be automatically paginated, and there will be no content distortion and format disorder when exporting PDF and Word. And the most important point is that the general Word-like report format will eventually need to be printed, so whether there will be print distortion and confusion when printing is a key point that must be considered

Whether the chart style is rich

Charts can be used to visually display data, so that managers can quickly determine the distribution, trend, proportion, year-on-year, and ring-to-month changes of business data from the complex data, and support managers' decision-making. At present, the mainstream chart types include more than 30 kinds of column charts, bar charts, pie charts, funnel charts, scatter charts, ring charts, area charts, etc. The number of chart types and whether they support drill-through, linkage and other functions are also one of the core points of the evaluation report tool.

Project deployment selection

Server deployment in the later stages of the project must also be considered. Current server deployments are generally Windows deployment, Winserver deployment, Linux deployment, in addition to Alibaba Cloud deployment, Huawei Cloud deployment, and so on. Based on the above deployment environments, you need to select the corresponding product selection according to your actual deployment environment when selecting products.

Project budget selection

The project budget is generally not the most technical thing to consider, but in actual projects, many product selections are still dead due to insufficient funds. Therefore, when considering a product, pay attention to the price of the product and choose a product that matches the project budget. This requires attention to the authorization mode of the report control from the following aspects:

Is the authorization mode an annual fee system or a perpetual authorization;

Is the authorization mode divided according to functional modules or full-function authorization;

Is the authorization mode only development authorization, or development authorization plus deployment authorization;

If there is deployment authorization, what is the form of deployment authorization.

Summarize

This article gives you a detailed introduction to the content that you need to pay attention to when choosing a report.