Custom Report Templates

Custom Report Templates#

Allegra helps you create beautiful reports. Generating a report comprises the following steps:

  1. Defining what items shall be included in the report

  2. Collecting and preparing these items for export into the desired format

  3. Filling a report template with information from these items

For the first step most of the time a user interface is needed, offering filtering options or other means of selecting the desired item set and information within that set (which attributes, history data, etc.).

You can choose from three report engines:

  • Microsoft Power BI

  • JasperReport

  • Excel templates

The MS Power BI engine uses a REST interface to get its data from Allegra. You thus create reports from within MS Power BI and not from within Allegra. MS Power BI is quite powerful and relatively easy to use. It has therefore become the preferred reporting engine for Allegra.

The JasperReport engine is less feature-rich than the MS Power BI engine. However, it has the advantage of allowing you to directly create reports in a variety of output formats like PDF, RTF, and Excel from within Allegra.

The Excel engine is good for simple tabular reports. It has the advantage of leveraging the know how many people have in creating Excel worksheets.