Creating online reports is always a bore... no more!
You have just created a new, shiny PHP-application.
You showed it to your client, who is statisfied... But then, the question comes up: what about reporting? Yes, we can nou register the clients for our counselors, but we want to know how many clients every counselor handles?
No problem. You create a report, right? That's not hard to do... You start with the SQL, then you use Smarty or whatever framework you might be using to output the table to the screen. No problem!
One week later: Yes, we can see the number of clients per counselor, but we want to know in what phase the clients are. This is in de database, right? Can you create a report about that? Of course you can!
Two weeks later...
Well, I think that we all know where this is leading: 35 reports! And the client keeps telling you: Normally, I can make reports like this in Excel, using Pivottables. Why can't I do that now?
But your hoster has wisely decided that ODBC-connections are not to be made to the database-server, and anyway, the firewall of your client would block this. Despair!? No more! phpSwivel does just what it's name implies: you can now let your client create reports online, just like, well, a pivottable!
You, as developer, need only to provide the SQL - phpSwivel will do the rest!