Basic CSS knowledge is needed for setting up visual themes and basics of SQL is required for querying databases. After initial setup, most people can build reports with an hour or two of training.
Yes, it's possible to define any kind of a page layout. Data tables and charts are also supported. You can get a sense what can be generated with CxReports from this document:
CxReports is a commercial product that lets you create PDFs from JSON using a WYSIWYG editor, perfect for building invoices. It can be hosted on-premise with Docker and has a Python client library. There’s a free tier allowing 500 PDFs/year.
Company branding is an important aspect of PDF creation that many tools struggle to handle correctly. PDF documents often need to include logos, company colors, fonts, and other branding elements. Puppeteer is popular because you can control these aspects through CSS. However, Puppeteer can be challenging to work with for larger documents, as each change requires programming effort or when your software needs to needs to serve multiple clients each with different requirements.
Never heard that someone is generating PDF documents at that pace. I'm working on a product that is used for mass PDF reporting based on Puppeteer. With nightly jobs, caching, and parallel processing, the performance is ok.
We offer comprehensive import/export functionality, ensuring seamless transfer of reports between environments. Moreover, workspaces allow you to segregate test and production environments or create unique environments for each client, allowing easy report customization. While reports are simply JSON files, which could theoretically be stored on the file system and checked in, doing so would hurt the flexibility we're trying to achieve.
Congratulations on the launch — it looks fantastic! My company is also developing a similar product. We've chosen to create a visual report designer that enables end-users (non-developers) to create and tweak PDF reports, and integrate with the existing IT infrastructure via the API. Our experience is that users want changes in reports very often and that it's best to allow them do it on their own.
My company is working on a product simplifying the creation of printable PDFs filled with tables and charts, leveraging a visual designer and API. It helps with the usual headaches like page breaking, page numbering, table of contents, etc.
My firm is currently in the process of creating a similar product that features a sophisticated visual page editor. While it's not officially launched yet, the product is about 95% complete. At the moment, we are on the lookout for early adopters.
For those interested in giving it a try, please contact us at support at cx-reports dot com. We are providing complimentary licenses to users who are eager to collaborate with us during this phase.
Intl is great for formatting dates, but parsing of culture-specific dates (and numbers) can be tricky. I wrote a small library that helps with that - https://github.com/codaxy/intl-io.
CxJS[1] offers a nice set of charts and widgets (disclaimer: I'm the author). Svg component could be used to represent an interactive BP diagram with coloring, tooltips, selection, etc. Seems like an interesting UI challenge.
