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It's late but I couldn't resist blogging about ColdFusion MX 7, which was finally released two days ago. First off, ColdFusion has come a LONG way since the 4.0 days. That's when I fell in love with the technology and never looked back. You see I work in a shop of hardcore Java developers, the best in the business and I'm sure they think I'm crazy when I start talking about ColdFusion. I'm sure you've had the conversation as well. If you ask any serious Java developer they'll most likely laugh at CF.
My point is not that CF is better than Java because it runs on a Java engine and CFML compiles down to Java bytecode. Anyway, I would like to stress how Macromedia has done an amazing job with the latest version allowing developers to generate reports with the greatest of ease.
So I wanted to take a quick look at one piece of the reporting functionality in CFMX 7. I want to walk you through the steps of creating a static PDF using HTML wrapped up in the CFDOCUMENT tag. So your general CFML will look like the following:
This simple code will generate the following PDF:
Note that I'm using the free developer edition which is stamped on all the reports. I'm not sure to what extent the reporting engine supports HTML as well as CSS. I will be doing some more experiments and post my results here. I can confidently say that you won't find an easier way to generate reports with any other technology. The crazy thing is that I haven't even started talking about the CF report builder which is a WYSIWYG tool for creating report templates. More on that later!
Posted by dennis baldwin at February 10, 2005 12:50 AM