I keep running my head into a wall working on a project and I am hoping you guys can help me. I have created a database that contains the addresses of contacts. What I need to accomplish is generating paper reports of these addresses. So, for example, I may have 25 addresses on one report related by some other data point. I figured that I should easily be able to pull info from my database and fill a PDF template with it that I could then print out, but this has proven harder than expected.

So far, I’ve tried airtable and notion (I know, but I was temporarily having server issues and I need to get this project done) I’ve also tried baserow and nocodb, and yet I can’t seem to figure out how to generate printable reports from my data.

Does anyone else know of an option? I’ve seen a recommendation for creating a spreadsheet or word document as a template that you then copy/paste your data into, but that feels… inelegant? Would something like appsmith or budibase be capable of this? Or is there some other (preferably self-hosted) software to accomplish this? I appreciate any help you can give me.

Edit: Sorry everyone, I guess I didn’t make it very clear. First off, I’ve been using the programs above to make my dB’s. So for instance, my nocodb is set up to use mysql. I didn’t generate the dB on my own, and admittedly, I’ve never interacted with a db directly using SQL markup before.I was hoping my goal could be accomplished with a low/no-code option as my coding skills are rudimentary right now.

As someone asked, for a printable-report, yes PDF is an option. As would a word document or spreadsheet, for that matter, just so long as I can get it into a nice, print-friendly format.

I do appreciate all the suggestions so far, and will look into them. Thanks!

  • @MigratingtoLemmyEnglish
    3•1 year ago
    1. I’m assuming you’re using a “normal” DB like MySQL/PostgreSQL.
    2. Select entries with common attributes (just search for the syntax to select rows based on attributes for your DB).
    3. Utilise a PowerShell script/Shell script/Python/any other language you’re comfortable with to parse the output from the DB into a file.
      • I mentioned PowerShell since you want to create an excel file, and using objects (assigning attributes to said object) might be easier to handle writing to a file with, rather than using regex/awk if you’re using Shell (although that’s fun in its own way).
    4. Write to file. PowerShell has modules to write to excel/csv, I don’t think a Shell script could do that as easily but you can definitely find a way (note that if you try using PowerShell on Linux, the modules I mentioned might not work).

    Cheers