创建报告生成器

Question

I'm in Enterprise support and the product I work with has a large database. There isn't a great report generating tool within the program so we get a lot of custom report requests. These are generally pretty manageable and we have a pretty big library of queries written in the past to dissect and modify to tailor to each individual client's needs. That being said, there's a couple problems with this:

1. It's needlessly time consuming.
2. A lot of of our techs don't have the SQL knowledge to do this.

I'd like to create a tool that will construct these queries, but don't really know how to approach the task (ideally it would pull the data and export it to a csv, but for now just writing the query would be fine). I'm familiar with SQL, javascript and python. If none of those would be ideal then I'll teach myself whatever is best for it as I go.

Let's take this sample database:

http://www.eclipse.org/birt/img/documentation/sample-database/ClassicModelsDBSchema.jpg

Let's say a client submits a ticket saying:

'Please produce a report of all our orders ever. Please include the order number, product ordered and its quantity, the product vendor, the date ordered, date we required it by, the actual date it was shipped, the sales rep who processed it and which office they were from.'

There'd probably be a template somewhere, but someone would end up creating a query such as this:

select o.orderNumber, p.productName, od.quantityOrdered, p.productVendor, o.orderDate, o.requiredDate, o.shippedDate, e.firstname, e.lastname, of.city, of.officeCode
from 
Orders o 
JOIN OrderDetails od ON o.orderNumber = od.orderNumber 
JOIN Products p ON od.productCode = p.productCode 
JOIN Customers c on o.customerNumber = c.customerNumber 
JOIN Employees e on e.employeeNumber = c.salesRepEmployeeNumber
JOIN Offices of on of.officeCode = e.officeCode 

I'd like to create something where I can just input something like "order number, product name, quantity, vendor, date needed, date shipped, Sales Rep, city, office" and the where logic and have it spit out the proper query.

I want to start small and just make something that can work with a small number of values from 3-4 of our most used tables. No where logic for the time being. It's an obviously simplistic program, but it seems like a good first attempt.

eg a program that can only handle customers, orders, orderDetails, and products.

Can someone point me in the right direction for how to even start this project? At this point, I'm kinda just spinning around looking for something I can grab and dig into.

Answer 1

Don't overthink it.

Put a web interface on the queries you already have, where you allow some of the inputs be parameterized [like customer]. If you have the basic query, there are a variety of tools that will let you :

• filter query results
• add or remove columns in the returned data set
• search within results
• export results

Start with this, because this is a LOT easier than trying to create a tool to write your SQL for you. Have a human assemble the core queries and use freely available software tools to put a presentation layer on them.