Chapter16.Graphing, Printing, and Reporting

Chapter 16. Graphing, Printing, and Reporting

IN THIS CHAPTER

Generating Graphs 435

Creating Printable Pages 457

Generating Reports 468

Many ColdFusion applications involve some type of data reporting. If you're building an online store, for instance, you'll want to generate printable invoices or create a series of report-style pages that show the number of products sold per month. If you're building a community site, you might create a page that shows how many people log on during which parts of the day, or run a report of daily usage. Or, if you're building a Web site for a movie studio (ahem), you might create reports that shows the expenses to date for each film, and which films are in danger of going over budget.

It'd be easy to imagine how each of these pages would turn out, if you could only use the skills you have already learned in this book. The pages would be easy to create with various uses of the <cfquery> and <cfoutput> tags, and they could be packed with useful information. You might even come up with some really attractive, creative uses of HTML tables to make the information easier to digest.

As the saying goes, a picture is often as good as a thousand wordsor a thousand totals or subtotals. ColdFusion provides exciting and revolutionary features that let you dynamically create charts and graphs, printable documents, and complete reports that can be used to report on whatever data you want.