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I want a good report interface.
Started 11 years ago by DaveVoss | 9 posts |
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Have you found a good third party report program for our MachForms? If so, I'd like to hear about it. I'm looking for something that allows me to send my users a link to the report for their form without their having to log in to the MachForm Panel. I've searched the web, but am confused by the offerings. Have you tried more than one report, please post your experiences, the good and the bad, and your recommendations.
I'm willing to create their report, but if they can modify their report, that would be a big plus. A graphical display of thier data would be nice. Totalling up columns would help. And of course to be able to sort on a column would be important. Sorting on multiple columns a plus.
THANKS!!
Posted 11 years ago # -
yuniar
Many people are asking this same question but so far I haven't found a really good report generator to be used in conjunction with MachForm :(
If anybody else found a good one, I would love to know it as well.MachForm Founder
Posted 11 years ago # -
I bought a PHP Report program from MySqlReports.com. I was very disappointed. It's a very poor tool with a bad GUI and severe limitations in my estimation and MachForm Reports require multiple table relationships. However, I have started on building a not so pretty, but hopefully effective way to create reports using VBA in Excel. I'm working on it in stages.
Yuniar, one thing that would help is to know if I can call a modified version of export_entries.php with parameters that would allow me to save all entries of a form to a spreadsheet without going through all the steps of clicking multiple times. The user will have to provide a userid and password, of course, and select where to save the file but I would like to just call a modified version of export_entries, feeding it the desired form_id as a parameter and then let the user select where to save the Excel file.
Also, if any of you VBA programmers access MySQL databases, it would save some time if you could share your methods of connecting to the database with me.
I can see why you haven't done a report generator yet. It's a lot of work.
Posted 11 years ago # -
Well Dave you just saved me 48 bucks...was going to buy that this week. I too am on the hunt.
What does not work for me is you can select fields and filter them but when you export it EVERY column exports. Unless I am missing something?Posted 11 years ago # -
Yes, all fields export. That's where Visual Basic comes in for me. In Visual Basic I open the saved Excel spreadsheet and then within the program delete the fields I don't want, sort/group on a field (could be more than one), sum my groups, and then save the spreadsheet with a revised name when I'm finished.
It's all VERY hardcoded for now and only works with one set of forms I use, but I hope to make it more generic so that it can work with other forms as well. It will be a work in progress for a very long time. I'm more of a hacker than a programmer, so it's not pretty stuff.
If anyone is interested in chatting about it, email me at dev@vosses.us, or post here if you think it's a message of general interest.
Posted 11 years ago # -
I agree! I want a good reporting interface to work with Machform... I like Machform, but I run a membership site that would greatly benefit if I could build a directory and admin lookup would be very nice!
Posted 11 years ago # -
The way I am trying to have reports is simply to use Pivot tables and pivot charts in Excel starting from Machform's export file. It's not bad, but with some field types you have a problem, for example in case of matrix fields where you don't have the question text in the file. What I would suggest to Machforms developers is to check if the exported file can be made more pivot table friendly somehow.
Posted 11 years ago # -
I think the way to go would be to build a totally separate system, MachCharts, or something similar, this is purely because I feel the development work in this would be rather large.
MachCharts could act as a plug-in for MachForms enabling it to turn into a survey monkey type system, or at the very least, allowing you to represent form submissions in some kind of customisable graphical way. It can be done by using JSON I would think...
Posted 11 years ago # -
Wow! MachCharts... I like it!!! This would be for sure the best solution!
Posted 11 years ago #
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