Developing Dynamic Reports Using Rich Internet Applications

In the business world, there are several software tools to generate reports automatically. We can do it with software like Crystal Reports and we can use different options to configure the reports. However, we observed that it is not flexible in several points like the structure of the data base or the changing of report’s parameters after its generation. To solve this problem, we propose the using of RIA – Rich Internet Applications in order to build dynamic reports. These dynamic reports will allow us to change the report’s contents and parameters after its first generation. With this, it will be possible to ask for different data in runtime, with no need for generating new reports. To implement this solution using RIAs, we tested and compared two different technologies: Microsoft Silverlight and Adobe Flash. We expected that the Silverlight should be more reliable than Flash in this context because it was integrated in the .NET framework. After our experiments, we concluded that the dynamic reports can be generated using RIAs. For that solution, we stated that Silverlight was better than Flash because it’s easier to use and to develop with.