Is there a Reporting Widget?

[KathrynJones]

Hi,

I have a Flex Viewer site showing Environmental constraints. I would like my users to be able to:

a) draw a polygon graphic around their area of interest or
b) use an exisiting polygon (from an editable polygon map service for example)
Then I want a PDF report to be generated that shows which environmental constraints intersect their area of interest. Simple right...? 🙂 Aparently not!

I've thought about using the clip and ship GP tool and somehow using the exported results to feed into a PDF report generator but I have no idea how to do this.

I've also seen this: http://www.esri.com/software/arcgis/arcgisonline/bao-api.html which looks promising although I don't need all the business analysis data so we wouldn't want to pay for a subscription.  The drawing of the graphic and the actual report generation is exactly what I'm after but I'm not sure I can use this code without a BA account.

I've also thought about leveraging the Report tools from ArcGIS Desktop (under View-Reports) but I'm not really sure how to do this either.

I'm just starting to use the Flex API with Flash Builder although I'm fairly familiar with the Flex Viewer.

This seems like it would be a really useful widget that I thought would have already existed, but I can't seem to find much out there. Any ideas or suggestions would be greatly appreciated by me and the rest of the Flex Viewer community.

Thanks in advance,
Kathryn

[RobertScheitlin__GISP]

Kathryn,

   Many people are just like you, they believe that printing and reporting is simple, and it might be in your particular use case but the problem for developers like me is that though your use case might actually be simple developing a widget that will handle and be configurable for every GIS flex user around the world that will possibly want to use the widget and have it do something a little different or more complicated, turns out to be a complete nightmare. I just thought you would like to know from a developer perspective why there is not widgets out there that do reporting and not many that do printing well either. There are just to many data and end user dependent variables.