The Big Table Problem | 8164 - 0 views
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Frederik Van Zande on 10 Jan 09My friend/ex-coworker Sam the Wonder Boy used to send me late night AIM messages comprised of only three letters, "M.F.R." This would then send chills up my spine, and I'd curl up on the floor in fetal position and weep nonstop. OK, I'm exaggerating a quite bit, and Sam doesn't do that anymore. "M.F.R." stands for "Monthly Forecast Report." It was one of the many modules of a huge intranet web application we worked on years ago. As the name implies, it was a report. Before arriving to the actual report screen, the user could select some criteria such as date range, products, etc. Depending on the selection, the report can have up to sixty columns and thousands of rows. It was quite a challenge both on the backend and frontend. I initially created it using server side Excel API and dumped it to the frontend as an excel sheet. In version 2 I made it as an HTML table with the Excel export option. In version 3 I ditched HTML and went for Crystal Report, in version 3.5 it became Active Report. In version 4 we rewrote the whole application as a .NET client app, with the report section being Excel again. In version 5, well there wasn't a version 5. The whole project got outsourced to India and the team was disbanded. But that's a blog for another day.
