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!

  • @froodloopEnglish
    1•1 year ago

    wkhtmltopdf

    https://wkhtmltopdf.org/

    Thank you so much! A long time ago I experimented with generating PDF files for job applications, because I needed layout capabilities and more than simple variable replacing, and while I found something and made it work, it didn’t support a lot of rather basic CSS. Which made me sad because I liked the concept of it (as much as I can ever like generating PDF files, anyway), and I love now knowing about this, it seems perfect :)

    • Max-PEnglish
      2•1 year ago

      I had rolled my own PDF generator with an entire layout engine before I found this. I was disappointed but immediately threw it all away in favor of that, because it’s so much easier. It’s just soooo damn much easier to use than keeping adding features to a custom engine. It handles CSS print stylesheets pretty well too, so you get to do all your page breaks and everything and the output is pretty clean and usable.

      I think it does generate mildly heavier/complex PDFs but at least it looks great.

      PHP PDF libraries 10 years ago were awful.