Show HN: CxReports – Low-Code Tool for User-Facing PDF Reports

12 points by mstijak 1 year ago | 6 comments

Marko here from Codaxy. For over two years, we have been working on CxReports, a low-code tool for creating user-facing PDF documents and reports.

We first saw the problem in wealth management, where reports are crucial for the user experience. Software vendors have customers who ask for customized reports with unique content, branding, and visuals. The solution was to build a tool that allows customization for each customer, which even customers themselves can use. Over time, this evolved to be a generic solution that works for various other use cases.

CxReports lets you build reports visually. You can connect to a database and get data using SQL queries. It supports scheduled report generation and delivery. The API enables accessing CxReports from other applications or workflows.

https://cx-reports.com/

You can easily try it out with our Docker image - https://docs.cx-reports.com/getting-started/docker/.

We offer a free tier for registered users.

How do you currently handle customized reporting? Are there specific challenges you face with generating user-facing reports? I’d love to hear your thoughts and feedback.

Looking forward to the discussion!

caragea 1 year ago |

We’ve been struggling with custom PDF reports for a while—either hardcoding templates or juggling serverless functions and libraries. It’s a real pain when clients want tweaks and we have to redeploy. The visual editing aspect of CxReports looks intriguing. If I can give non-technical team members control over layouts and styling that'd be great. How flexible is the design tool? Can it handle complex data visualizations like nested tables, charts, or custom fonts easily?

mstijak 1 year ago | |

Yes, it's possible to define any kind of a page layout. Data tables and charts are also supported. You can get a sense what can be generated with CxReports from this document:

https://cx-reports.com/CxReports-Visual-Guide.pdf

xv0idx 1 year ago |

My team is currently running with jsreports for about a year or so now. The biggest problem that we are having right now is the absurd amount of dev time that we need to allocate in order to produce anything meaningful. I wonder what's the least amount of technical literacy needed to produce a report? From the text I assume that the goal is to have wider selection of people who can work with the tool.

mstijak 1 year ago | |

Basic CSS knowledge is needed for setting up visual themes and basics of SQL is required for querying databases. After initial setup, most people can build reports with an hour or two of training.

bosky101 1 year ago |

Self hosted?

mstijak 1 year ago | |

Yes, you can easily install it using Docker.

https://docs.cx-reports.com/getting-started/docker/