Admin Reports and such stuff in Drupal

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I came across the following line on a site "Views has long been a very popular Drupal add-on module that allows non developers to create lists, posts, galleries, tables, maps, graphs, menu items, blocks, reports, forum posts and more."

The term "non-developers" caught my attention. I'm curious to know what would developers use to present things like lists, search results, reports, charts. Are there other tools/techniques available that provides better performance and flexibility to control thru code in the Drupal world.

I'm a D7 beginner but very much comfortable with PHP.

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drupal

1 Answers

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Your question appears to be about "what would developers use to present things like lists, search results, reports, charts?". Consider using that as the title of your question ... I don't really see the reason why the title is about "admin reports".

Here is an attempt to answer your question, regarding charts:

  • Module chart can be used as an API. More details are included in Using the Chart API (and its child pages).

  • Module charts (note the extra "s", not a typo ...) can be used as an API also. More details are included in Using the Charts API (and its child pages).

  • Actually there are many more modules available for creating charts in Drupal, refer to my Comparison of Charting modules for many more details.

Here is an attempt to answer your question, regarding reports: refer to module forena. Here is part of its project page:

Forena is database report writing software built on the Drupal platform. Forena is built of the idea that if you can write the SQL necessary to get the data out of a database, it should take very little work to get that data out on the web. It is designed to leverage knowledge of HTML, CSS¨, SQL and Java Script to help you create rich interactive web reports.

To understand how Forena complements the views module, review to the Reasons for considering Forena. Forena also facilitates the creation of charts (graphs) in Drupal by using the SVG Graph library (PHP and open source).

For more details about Forena, 2 types of documentation are available:

  • Community documentation.

  • Documentation that comes with Forena, which you can access right after install and enable of the module. Checkout the demo site for an online example of the current:

    • Forena documentation - use the link 'Reporting documentation' or visit relative link /reports/help.
    • Forena samples - use the link 'Reporting samples' or visit relative link /reports/samples (these samples are fully functional, so make sure to experiment a bit with it, such as the drill downs available on the SVG Graph sample).

The newest 7.x-4.x version of Forena also includes an amazing (I think) UI for either creating your reports (the WYSIWYG report editor) and/or for creating your SQL queries (the Query Builder).

Be aware: I'm the maintainer of modules chart and charts, and co-maintainer of forena. Refer to my profile for yet some other modules related to charting and reporting that I'm involved with.