Reasons for considering Forena

How Forena complements the views module

Some common questions for people not familiar with the Forena Reports module (question they have, or should ask themselves):

• "Why not use views instead of forena?" ... The answer is generally something along the lines of "Most forena users love views, views is great! If you want to report against external data though, or you want to do aggregation or analytics, Forena is much more suited to address these requirements."
• "What does it take to create reports / charts with the typical Business Intelligence tools? Where would I start in case such reports are to be shown on a Drupal site ... and the actual data may either come from any of Drupal's own tables, or in a PDO-style external database, or some XML or CSV file?" ... Trying to answer these questions leads to more questions such as "How far can you get (and what would it take to get there) with the views module (not even talking about how to secure the access to such data)?

Key features

Here are some more reasons for considering Forena:

1. Forena was originally created to report against external data systems. You can do this with views but it requires a LOT of custom code. With Forena you just need SQL knowledge to do it.
2. If you have custom data structures and want to avoid the overhead and complexity of exposing custom data to views then you might be interested in using Forena.
3. Master detail reporting is MUCH easier in Forena than it is in views. It can be done but it is quite difficult and takes other modules.
4. If you need to report on aggregate data or do any kind of analytics you probably want Forena. Views will group (and count), but if you need sums, averages, etc. and want to leverage SQL group by expressions then it's totally for you.
5. Reports created by Forena (combined with SVGGraph and mPDF) can be saved (exported) as PDF documents with embedded graphs. Other supported formats for saving a report are CSV, XLS, DOC, HTML, etc.
6. Forena is great for enterprise people just learning web reporting. It leverages existing knowledge in SQL/HTML/CSS/Javascript. You don't have near as much API to learn with Forena than you do with views and other technologies. You can do a lot without any PHP.

Testimonials from existing forena users

Here are some forena testimonials from existing users:

• #2446855-2: Default value in nested data block?: Everything between Forena is a big help right now because ... and ... and all that fun stuff.
• #2444153-7: Authenticated users can't see any graphs: ... the support from the 'Forena crowd' is brilliant, ..., our company would like to add some 'attribution' for Forena on our landing page ...

Please add similar links (using similar markup) if you're aware of other testimonials, typically somewhere in the forena issue queue.

Other requirements

If you have other reporting requirements that don't seem to fit in the list above, and you wonder if forena would be a good fit for you, start a quick search in forena's issue queue. If you still can't find the answer there, just ask about it by creating a (support request) issue in forena 's issue queue.