Does something like this exist for C#?
HN user
mstijak
Javascript and .NET geek. Author of CxJS and CxReports.
Yes, you can easily install it using Docker.
Basic CSS knowledge is needed for setting up visual themes and basics of SQL is required for querying databases. After initial setup, most people can build reports with an hour or two of training.
Yes, it's possible to define any kind of a page layout. Data tables and charts are also supported. You can get a sense what can be generated with CxReports from this document:
CxReports is a commercial product that lets you create PDFs from JSON using a WYSIWYG editor, perfect for building invoices. It can be hosted on-premise with Docker and has a Python client library. There’s a free tier allowing 500 PDFs/year.
Are there any advantages to using Firefox over Chrome for exporting PDFs with Puppeteer?
Company branding is an important aspect of PDF creation that many tools struggle to handle correctly. PDF documents often need to include logos, company colors, fonts, and other branding elements. Puppeteer is popular because you can control these aspects through CSS. However, Puppeteer can be challenging to work with for larger documents, as each change requires programming effort or when your software needs to needs to serve multiple clients each with different requirements.
Never heard that someone is generating PDF documents at that pace. I'm working on a product that is used for mass PDF reporting based on Puppeteer. With nightly jobs, caching, and parallel processing, the performance is ok.
Working on a product that could be similarily described.
CxReports: Self-hosted, web-based PDF reporting tool.
I'm working on a PDF report builder with a visual editor, API, and scheduled delivery via email.
We offer comprehensive import/export functionality, ensuring seamless transfer of reports between environments. Moreover, workspaces allow you to segregate test and production environments or create unique environments for each client, allowing easy report customization. While reports are simply JSON files, which could theoretically be stored on the file system and checked in, doing so would hurt the flexibility we're trying to achieve.
Congratulations on the launch — it looks fantastic! My company is also developing a similar product. We've chosen to create a visual report designer that enables end-users (non-developers) to create and tweak PDF reports, and integrate with the existing IT infrastructure via the API. Our experience is that users want changes in reports very often and that it's best to allow them do it on their own.
Fixed. Thanks!
My company is working on a product simplifying the creation of printable PDFs filled with tables and charts, leveraging a visual designer and API. It helps with the usual headaches like page breaking, page numbering, table of contents, etc.
We're working closely with early adopters at this stage.
My firm is currently in the process of creating a similar product that features a sophisticated visual page editor. While it's not officially launched yet, the product is about 95% complete. At the moment, we are on the lookout for early adopters.
For those interested in giving it a try, please contact us at support at cx-reports dot com. We are providing complimentary licenses to users who are eager to collaborate with us during this phase.
Screenshot: https://pasteboard.co/th5f4s0uVWJH.png
A very nice tool and a cute website. How do you handle mobile navigation without client-side javascript?
Intl is great for formatting dates, but parsing of culture-specific dates (and numbers) can be tricky. I wrote a small library that helps with that - https://github.com/codaxy/intl-io.
Looks perfect. Good job!
CxJS[1] offers a nice set of charts and widgets (disclaimer: I'm the author). Svg component could be used to represent an interactive BP diagram with coloring, tooltips, selection, etc. Seems like an interesting UI challenge.
[1] https://cxjs.io/
CxJS tries to solve common UI problems related to CRUD apps and dashboards.
Shameless plug here after a failed HN post. For people interested in taking many quick notes using markdown please check https://tdoapp.com. The app allows you to organize tasks into boards and lists and use keyboard to quickly navigate. Also, CSS and regular expressions are used to highlight tasks. The code is available on GitHub - https://github.com/codaxy/tdo
Reminded me of Anti-Grain [1].
I would like to share my view as of an author of a JS UI framework. It largely depends on the project, but sometimes it can be very difficult to integrate many libraries to play nicely together. To build an admin web application with some data entry, a developer would need a set of standard widgets like inputs and menus, a nice data table implementation, form validation engine, a router and a state management library. For more serious applications charts may also be needed, multi-lingual support and some advanced widgets like maps, html editor, calendar, or diagrams. If each of those is a separate library with separate rules for styling, state management, selection, number and date formatting, context menus, tooltips, the project quickly becomes very very complex. If all things are integrated into a framework you get a sane development experience. There are always some sacrifices and some features may be missing, but frameworks usually cover 80-90% of all requirements. The problem is that requirements change and frameworks usually have hard time to catch up and preserve backward compatibility.
Have you ever looked at CxJS?
Tdo is built for handling many little tasks by using only a keyboard. Feature-wise, markdown is used for formatting, RegEx and custom CSS task highlighting, search supports logical operators (AND, OR), Firebase enables realtime sync, etc...
Using CxJS grid and other widgets it's relatively easy to support all of the scenarios mentioned in this amazing article. Please note that CxJS is not open-source.
This is a new version of tdo based on Firebase which supports new features such as offline mode, realtime data sync between devices, drag & drop and touch events.
CxJS uses the same concept for charts, form validation, and other inter-component communication.
Have you looked at CxJS? CxJS offers chart controls and advanced data tables which makes it perfect for building admin apps.
It's very simple to configure url rewriting and pre-rendering for SPAs. CxJS website (https://cxjs.io) and documentation is hosted on Netlify and it has been an amazing experience so far. We were on their single user $9 paid plan, but they switched us on the free tier with the pricing change some time ago.