Automatic Report Generation with Web, TeX, and SQL


Boris Veytsman*, Maria Shmilevich**
* AES ITT Industries, ** George Mason University
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One of the most time-consuming task of a manager for a federal contractor is the creation of reports: weekly, monthly, quarterly and yearly as well as special reports at the end of project or any given date. Such reports are usually made by copying and pasting the daily reports of subordinates.

The system described in this talk makes these reports automatically. The members of project team file their daily work results using a Web interface. These entries are kept in a SQL database. The report generation utility is launched through Web interface. It creates a TeX file by selecting the data relevant to the given set of contracts and tasks, employees, time periods, etc., and collating the individual reports. The result is then put through pdfTeX or latex2html or latex2rtf to create either a PDF report or editable (e.g. in Microsoft Word) file.