Unix reports into pdf to serve over web

[Haybails90]

Hey Folks,

I just stepped into a new company this month and I am trying to wrap my brain around a current scenario which they would like solved.

This is a relatively large private company with yearly business in the billions coming via slightly more than 150 'branch' locations around the US. Now the company's backbone is running on AT&T UNIX System 5 Release 4 (with possible plans to switch over to AIX 5.2 UNIX) which poops out about two to three thousand UNIX reports PER MONTH! The plan is to make month end reports available on our secure, asp based, web site. I don't need to make ALL of these available each month (LOL) but a select few. Now, they say they'd originally thought about PDF versions of the reports but, as some of the larger branches are still on dial-ups, they originally nixed the idea for two reasons:
1.) they were originally manually taking each report and saving it as PDF
2.) some of the reports can get up to a thousand or more pages in length and the upload via dial-up was scaring them.

So, my very basic quest right now is for any feed back on what may be the best way to grapple with this scenario. Should I be thinking PDF? Or would I be better off walking into the 'Crystal Reports' frame of mind? Or, still yet, looking elsewhere for a better solution?

Thank you, one and all, for any thoughts and feedback.




Haybails90

 

[WardXmodem]

Pardon a "generic" sort of answer, but when you have a lot of data and a thin pipe over which to access it, the best "model" is a client-server model, one in which not the data, but only the part you are looking at, is transferred over the wire.

Unfortunately I don't have a solution to hand you on what might do this - but for example Terminal Server or Citrix or even pcAnywhere would allow people to move just PICTURES of PC SCREENS back and forth over the wire, while accessing data that is somewhere far away but available THERE via a fat pipe.

Citrix was specifically designed for slow speed connections (way back when) in that they used a compression algorithm to make it efficient to move data (screen images and updates) over dial up with acceptable performance.

PDF files might be great if you need to preserve the formatting etc, but these "reports" might be little more than text data perhaps?

If I were to be so bold as to suggest an architecture, I would use your companies Unix skills - perhaps in "perl scripting" for example, to convert the reports to web pages, I'm envisioning a way to let users see only a page or so at a time (efficient over dial-up) and ideally to put in a search field. It could almost be like the wonderful implementation of Tek-Tips where they could see their reports, search, click on a [Next] button for the next page, or a [Page___] to go to page 999 of the report to "browse through it" or of course best search on what they need.

I don't pretend to be the person with the skills or knowledge to "do" this, but I can "dream", can't I?

I hope this helps and I apologize that the answer isn't appropriate for the Acrobat forum, if you'd like to continue the conversation elsewhere that's fine.