How to Quickly Generate Reports from Delphi Application using FastReport

Reporting is indeed a crucial task in every application development. For instance, it allows you to monitor or analyze the performance of your application. More importantly, these reports can be used to gather and analyze user feedback which can help developers understand user needs and improve user satisfaction. In addition to that, reports can help you identify or track bugs or issues within the application. In this video from the Coding Bootcamp 2023, MVP George De Luca will introduce us to a tool called FastReport.

How does FastReport Work?

FastReport is a powerful band-oriented report generator that allows you to build reports of any type. For this video, we will attempt to create a PDF report and be able to display it via web application. To do so, we will need to create first an application using IntraWeb. IntraWeb is a web application development framework for the Delphi programming language. Known for its beginner-friendly features, IntraWeb allows developers to design web applications without requiring any knowledge of HTML or Javascript.

George will walk us through the process of creating a basic IntraWeb project. With the designer’s easy drag-and-drop feature, George will show how quick and simple it is to add and integrate components to the application. This project utilizes components like TFDConnection to establish a connection to a database. For this video, we will be using the employee database sample from Firebird. We will also use components like TFDQuery and FastReport components to help us use the report template and to be able to generate reports in PDF format. This tool allows you to export the finished report not just in PDF format but in many other different formats like RTF, XLSX, XML, DOCX, TXT, CSV, Excel OLE, PowerPoint, HTML, MHT, XPS, JPEG, BMP, and PNG to name a few.

To learn more about FastReport and IntraWeb and how to be able to display the report in PDF format, feel free to watch the video below.