Complex Summary Report

[kiwiora]

Hi all,

I have a complex summary report I need to produce. I do not want to report on the underlying data, just the summary. The data is made up of a lot of related tables.

At the moment I've created a script which essentially searches for each component of the report, populates a set of variables and concatenates it into a text field. The problem with this is I need it to get a bit of eye candy to go to a client. i.e I can't do columns, nor appropriate tabulation in this format

So my question is this, in your experience, what is the cleanest, best practice to produce these sorts of reports.

I can do HTML, but do not have the knowledge of XML, and the deadline is this week (yeah thanks guys for the notice!), so I can only learn XML sometime down the track. I exported it as HTML and was rather funky, I guess I can play around with using substitute of

for ¶ and exporting as text.

I don't particularly like the idea of global fields for every single line item (there's enough fields already), but will if I have to

TIA

==============REPORT=================

Portfolio Progression

This Month

open claims start of month - 73

new claims - 1

closed claims - 0

total claims end of month - 74

Year to date

open claims start of year - 84

new claims - 30

closed claims - 40

total claims end of year - 74

Open Portfolio

Average Estimate 74

Damages - $149,024.59 (claimed: $539,538.36)

Legal Fees - $13,526.98 (costs reserve: $8,121.17)

Outlays - $120.52

Overall - $162,672.09

Average Age 74

- - - Pre-proceeding

Date of Injury - 33

Date of Claim - 9

Date of Instructions - 10

- - - Litigated

Date of Injury - 49

Date of Claim - 24

Date of Instructions - 22

- - - Total 74

Date of Injury - 36

Date of Claim - 12

Date of Instructions - 12

Age Breakdown

- - - DOI Breakdown 74

less than 6 months - 23 - (17.5%)

6 months to less than 9 months - 13 - (17.57%)

9 months to less than 12 months - 7 - (9.46%)

12 months to less than 18 months - 12 - (16.22%)

18 months to less than 24 months - 10 - (13.51%)

24 months or more - 9 - (12.16%)

- - - DOC Breakdown 72

less than 6 months - 25 - (17.5%)

6 months to less than 9 months - 12 - (16.67%)

9 months to less than 12 months - 9 - (12.5%)

12 months to less than 18 months - 10 - (13.89%)

18 months to less than 24 months - 7 - (9.72%)

24 months or more - 9 - (12.5%)

Finalised Claims Outcomes

Average Cost (<$1m)40

Damages - $102,138.13

Legal Fees - $10,683.55

Outlays - $47.34

Overall - $159,449.16

Average Cost (>$1m)0

Damages - $.00

Legal Fees - $.00

Outlays - $.00

Overall - $.00

Average Age

Date of Injury - 31

Date of Claim - 9

Date of Instructions - 9

Duration Breakdown 40

less than 6 months - 7 - (17.5%)

6 months to less than 9 months - 10 - (25%)

9 months to less than 12 months - 13 - (32.5%)

12 months to less than 18 months - 6 - (15%)

18 months to less than 24 months - 4 - (10%)

24 months or more - 0 - (0%)

[ferdly]

Hi Kiwiora,

Not sure if this is in-time, but I do think that you are on the right track with HTML.

Remember, well formatted HTML *is* XHTLM *is* XML.

So you can go all "quick-n-dirty" by stringing table-rows of html and make it look pretty nice in a WebViewer window and then write that same html to a file and print from a browser too.

For eye-candy, the "separation" of data from presentation is in the css. Every minute you enhance your css skills pays off over and over, and all your reports are clean and have a consistent look-and-feel. And if the client wants sweeter eye-candy, then you can just give them the css file and tell them to hire a graphic designer that knows css. (But that the css of a FileMaker layout could be externally modified after the fact...)

Using HTML lets you construct reports that lean on the relational model, or where the "snapshot" isn't worth the relational overhead of adding this that and the other table instance to the relationship graph just for a single report and/or a bunch of kludgey calculation fields, you can brute force the HTML to be anything you can dream up.

Hope that is helpful,

Ferdly