[reportlab-users] Advice on switching from XSL-FO (FOP) to ReportLabs

[Felix McAllister]

Hi,

We're in the middle of developing a large ERP system, a big component of 
which is a reporting module. Early on, we chose XSL-FO and FOP to automate 
the generation of all our reports into PDF format. (We're using FOP because 
it is free: we can't afford expensive commercial systems). We have about 250 
reports to do. The data comes from a SQL Server database in an XML format. 
Our experience with the 10 or so that we've implemented using FO has lead us 
to the following conclusions:

1. XSL is tedious to program in and difficult to debug.
2. Because of the limitations of XSL as a programming language, we've had do 
'pipeline' the processing in certain cases to generate the end-result FO 
file. (XML -> XSL-1 | XSL-2 | XSL-3 -> FO file)
3. This makes the development time for a report quite long.
4. Reuse of code between reports is difficult or non-existant.
5. FOP is slowish. For most of the time, that doesn't matter (e.g. it takes 
5 seconds on a server to generate an invoice). However, we have a couple of 
large batch jobs that will process tens of thousands of documents that must 
run within a 12 hour period. At 5 seconds per invoice, 20,000 of them will 
take 27 hours.

We're currently evaluating other free and open-source tools. We've played 
around with the ReportLabs demos and are impressed, especially with the 
speed of execution, so we're asking if anyone familiar with the ReportLabs 
toolkit could give us some advice/pointers.

Our main areas of concern are:

* Reducing development time.
* Increasing re-use among reports.
* Increasing speed for batch processing ( although I don't think this will 
be an issue from what we've seen)

Thanks,

Felix McAllister.

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