• Birt
• report customization
• XBRL
• XML reporting
• XSL-FO

In the context where we are working there are a lot of different clients requesting similar reports with some differences due to customization of elements' position, colours and pages, all of them providing data in an xml document.
At the moment the report's xsl stylesheet is modified for each request. We would like to reduce the number of different reports created and allow the customization of a single one big report that, via some customization steps will provide a pdf report with the desired characteristics for the user.
Currently there are many platforms allowing report creation with a GUI and retrieving data from a structured xml file. What we cannot obtain by any of these existing platforms, is a huge level of contents and a way of representing element customization as the companies are requesting. Particular problems have arisen in choosing pages and elements to be shown, and in customizing colours of charts in a simple way.
Since reports will be customized directly from the client, who knows xml but is not an expert in using it, what we are looking to achieve is an easy way to customize reports in xml language.
The aim of this project is to provide a platform that starting from a complex xml document (derived from an existent application) describing in detail the report structure, will create an easy xml for customization and an xsl stylesheet for the final xsl-fo structure. In a second phase the user will provide the xml document containing the data, charts will be created, customization will be applied to the xsl if they need to modify the xsl structure, or by the xsl if they modify the report structure, and the final customized report is created.
We would like to use as much as possible existing free products, exploiting their potentiality and adding some other newer through some simple actions for the end user, who can be either a technical specialist (for report structure creation and customization in case the end user is requesting some particular customization who is not able to apply by itself) or not (for report customization).