Report customization nightmare

[David Eisner]

On Tue, Jun 29, 2010 at 5:01 PM, Michael Leone wrote:
> That, of course,  presumes you know how to "adjust standard HTML". Not
> everyone does. I suppose (never having looked into it) that perhaps

At a certain point, you are going to have to express the logic and
layout of the report in one language or another.  There will always be
the presumption that the report designer knows this language (or set
of languages).

There is a trade-off between expressiveness and simplicity (and
libraries can help), but there's no avoiding the need for some kind of
language.  Even with an SQL-accessible back end, you'll need code to
massage and manipulate the numbers you pull out in all but the
simplest cases.

-David