Collin Tobin

Reporting is one of the most common tasks developers have faced since the beginning of the IT revolution. In the past, Macromedia ColdFusion developers didn't have many choices for easily creating reports and integrating them with their applications. They either had to leave the comfort of using ColdFusion and use a third-party solution or write CFML to generate HTML layouts - a solution that involved writing a lot of CFML code to read data from database, slice and dice the data, and generate HTML output. Doing that kind of work can be tedious, repetitive, and just plain boring. Even after all that hard work, the final result can be less than optimal. Because HTML has no notion of page breaks, page headers, and footers, the results seldom look very good when the browser ... (more)