Report Manager Web Server is a multithread application that works together with a web server application. It allows any number of HTML client machines to execute reports obtaining ready to print Adobe PDF files.
The web report server will ask user name and password, then show any available report groups, and any report in each group, allowing to change report parameters before executing the report, all is done via HTML and without the need of enabling Cookies in the client browser.
The client machine only need a Html Browser, if the browser have an Adobe PDF file viewer plugin, the user will see the report in the screen, else the user can save the resulting file and proces it with any tool like pdf2ps or with Adobe PDF Reader.
The web report server supports Linux (Apache) and Windows (apache 2-Microsoft IIS 5).
See Installation instructions for more information.
The web report sever must have any database drivers required by available reports, optionally the web server can be also be the database server, but the database server can be any machine accesible by the report server machine, so you can distribute the work of generated reports, for example the report client can be a Internet enabled machine running any operating system, requesting a report from a far network, the server generates the report requesting process intensive querys to a high performance database server, after the calculation of the report is done, the server sends the result to the client machine.
The web server is optimized to use very little bandwith.
Configuration
See Installation instructions for configuration information.
See web server operations page for operation options, basically you can operate the web server passing parameters in the URL.
By default there is only one user named Admin and without password, in the report web server Admin user can't do administration tasks.
Other considerations
When you design reports for use with web report server you must configure them to be thread safe, that is make sure your driver supports multithread (as far as I know all drivers supports this) and your database connection string is thread safe, for example to access Interbase/Firebird databases provide the always the hostname (or write localhost), so the access method to the database is thread safe (local access method is not thread safe).
Also you should define parameters, and the report should be a separate independent entity that only requires user parameters to execute.