Building Custom Reports in MySQL
 
 

If your data is stored in MySQL, PostgreSQL or Oracle database, and you need a tool to help you building custom reports and turn data into useful information, Navicat Report Builder is the obvious choice.

With Navicat Report Builder, data in your databases can be transformed to various reports such as Invoices, Sales Statistics, Order Report, Point of Sales, Form Letter, and Mailing Labels, etc.

Navicat Report Builder

Navicat Report Builder is included in the Navicat Windows Enterprise Edition, it helps to deliver data in your MySQL, PostgreSQL or Oracle database in a presentable manner and turns it into valuable information. Various kinds of Reports can be built easily without additional efforts. Schedulers can also be set to deliver Reports automatically. Bundled with Report Viewer, it allows multiple users to access your report anytime at anywhere.

Existing data can be imported and used in building Reports from various data sources such as MS Excel, MS Access, Text File, XML, Paradox, Dbase, Lotus 123, and from ODBC.

Get Familiarize yourself with Navicat Report Builder:



The Report Designer, pictured below contains three workspaces: Data, Design, and Preview. When first displayed, the Report Designer defaults to the design workspace because this is where you will spend the majority of your report building time.



To build a Report, Basically, there are 3 major steps:

1) To link your Report to your data
2) To design the Layout for your Report
3) Preview and Export your Report

Linking your Data to the Report

The Data tab allows you to create dataviews, which used to supply data to your report. Dataviews can be created via the Query Wizard or Query Designer. Both of these visual tools allow you to select necessary tables and fields, create search criteria and sort order, etc for dataviews.



Query Wizard provides a step-by-step wizard to guide you to create the basic dataview visually. Then, you can use the Query Designer to modify the dataview.



You can enter more calculations and criteria in the Query Designer to build complex reports (e.g. search reports). The SQL tab shows the SQL statement for retrieving the data form the database.



Designing the Layout of your Report

The Design tab is the main session for designing and organizing the report layout. It contains a Report Wizard and some sample report that allows you to quickly create an entire report layout. This is great for generating a simple report.



If you want to design your own layout, you can simply drag and drop the data from the data tree and use the toolbar to add different components.



Preview and Exporting your Report

The Preview tab enables you to preview and navigate the report output. For a search report, you can perform searching to filter the data.



After confirming the report output, you can print/export the report to PDF, MS Excel, etc file formats. Together with Navicat Schedule feature, you can set schedule to print the report and send the exported file to your email automatically.




Sharing of Reports among users

Navicat Report Viewer allows you to navigate reports designed by Navicat Report Builder. You can share reports with someone who does not have Navicat running on his computer but has Navicat Report Viewer installed. It highly increases the flexibility and convenience for viewing reports.

Simply create a connection to your server and place the report files (.rtm) within the database subfolder under the Report Location.

Same as the Navicat Report Builder, you can print/export report files.



Licensing

Navicat Report Builder is a feature in Navicat Enterprise Edition on Windows platform. For every license of Navicat Enterprise Edition, a license of Report Viewer is bundled to allow sharing of reports between users.

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