Next assignment - Reports

I'd like to thank folks on this list for their feedback on recent assignments which have included a popup calendar, javascript compression, a utility for maintaining user defined fields, and a utility for uploading and attaching files to records in our database.

My next assignment is to come up with a solution for reports. The scope includes generating, cataloging, and working with reports. I have the leeway to develop something myself, but I'm not particularly inclined to reinvent the wheel. Vendor solutions can be considered. The project is NOT well defined, but I understand that reporting is a broadly scoped topic.

The report library (or catalog) needs a browser-based UI and needs to be more robust and extensible than the WRKOUTQ command. Report formats need to include HTML and PDF as well as ASCII text.

One of my colleagues used Jasper Reports to generate High-school Student Transcripts and the PDF output looked great, but runtime performance was poor.

For generating reports, I've considered writing an API for RPG programmers to output HTML or PDF files, and cross-reference generated stream files with entries in the catalog. This is appealing to me as an RPG programmer and addresses a couple concerns. First, many of our reports are produced as part of a larger process. Posting fees to accounts generates a transaction listing, for example. Second, the API that generates the report could also generate index entries in the catalog. For example, if a program generated a 60,000 page report of student transcripts, it would be helpful if the viewer in the report catalog could filter the page listing to include only those pages for a particular student.

Any thoughts?

Thanks,

Nathan.