Question

Reporting in Mendix

22

Hi guys, just a quick query on Mendix reporting... Throughout the years Mendix development has improved significantly, and from those early versions to the most recent ones, there obviously has been a great deal of effort to improve the modeler, management tools etc, which is great for the development community. However, the reporting side of it never seems to get any look into whatsoever? Are you guys planning to look at this very important area and improve it like all others? Reporting is key to many customers and every time we attempt to use the reporting tool it's a bit of a disaster and we end up ditching the idea, so we end up using tools like jasper report with the use of ARS by Cape Groep. You advertise that anything can be connected to your databases (open database) and all that jargon, but if we have the App and DB in the cloud we cannot access our own database with any of these external tools that could provided a bit more flexibility to the customer in enquiring their own data. Reporting tools are not easy to build and I would agree that Mendix is pretty good in building a decent application and keeping reporting external, so Mendix provides the engine to store the data and some reporting tool extracts the data as the customer requires, but if we cannot access that data in the cloud... it's very difficult. I put this across to you to let us know if there are any plans to improve the reporting tool in Mendix or allow access via a specific channel to the cloud so customers can use any reporting tool they want to access their own data that is held in the cloud. We've already lost a couple of projects when discussions about reporting and data access arise, as this is definitely the weakest area of Mendix development. Any ideas, views, future plans, possibles solutions on this are very welcomed. regards, Luis.

asked 2012-09-28

Luis Rodrigues

8 answers

Johan den Haan · Answer 1 · 2012-10-01

Hi Luis,

Thanks for your question. We have indeed improved many aspects of our product over the last years and we keep doing so.

Regarding reporting there are a number of possibilities:

Use the built-in reporting functionality.
Use our widget API to create your own rich reporting widgets. There are some great examples in our App Store.
Use a reporting plug-in from one of our partners (you mentioned Cape Groep as an example).
Connect a third-party tool to Mendix.

Point 4 can be done via our webservice API or via a direct connection on the database. Webservice connections are possible in all deployment options. A direct connection to the database is possible in private cloud environments. We are working on a way to connect any private and on-premise environment to our enterprise cloud dashboard. This will enable the same web UI for all deployment options.

That being said, I take the feedback in this thread very serious. I propose to do the following:

I will research the possibility of a direct database connection for apps in our standard cloud. I will come back to you asap.
I would like to hear everyones suggestion for specific improvements for our built-in reporting capabilities.

Pieter Verkroost · Answer 2 · 2012-10-03

Hi Luis, Clear question that is why we developed the JasperReports API. With this API we can answer the questions of our customers.

More over the question raises that customer want to have more run-time flexibility. We are now busy with investigating/developing Ad Hoc Report Designer of JasperReport for this.

Maybe our current solution is not sufficient for your case? In that case we can discuss this so we can make improvements to our solution.

Regards, Pieter

Herbert Vuijk · Answer 3 · 2012-10-02

I totally agree with Luis. I recently investigated the reporting possibilities with Mendix and came to the same conclusion. Mendix provide the widget API but the current reporting widgets are not good enough. However we've build a query/reporting tool ourself within in Mendix and it's used in production by one of our biggest customers and it fulfills most of their reporting needs.

Paul Jewell · Answer 4 · 2012-09-28

Hi Luis. You know that I agree with you on this. From a commercial point of view, it reduces one of the key advantages of Mendix vs other products which use proprietary databases.

There are lots of excellent, mature, fully-featured, drag and drop style reporting tools out there that will work on any of the databases supported by Mendix; the problem is that we can't use them in the Mendix Cloud. So we can move to on-premise, but then we lose the benefits of all the nice Cloud deployment features.

Catch 22 really.

Paul

Toon Verschoor · Answer 5 · 2012-09-28

Hi Luis,

Thank you for this write up. Important information you provide.

You're writing that "you cannot connect to an App+Db in the cloud"? Do you know why, what's the issue? And is ARS from Cape different, did they "solve" or work around those issues?

I'm very interested in this subject as I'm looking into reporting tools myself for a customer.

Thanks again. Toon

Cees van den Heuvel (Intermediad) · Answer 6 · 2012-09-28

As an early Mendix adaptor (working with the platform since version 1) we couldnot agree more.

We also have lost potential customers due to not being able to fulfill their reporting requirements and it is the main reason that we still run a number of our projects on on-premise application and database servers instead of in the Mendix cloud.

Cees

Chris de Gelder · Answer 7 · 2012-09-28

Agree Luis, The mendix widget api offers enough flexibility to create a good reporting widget. A matter of priority.

Mike Kumpf · Answer 8 · 2014-03-05

One of the points that Johan made suggested developing reporting tools by using a web services connection to a public cloud based application. Has anyone tried this approach? Any thoughts on the feasibility of this and suitability to integrate with third party reporting tools in this way?