I have a simple but very useful mariadb/mysql database for my art slideshow app and I use the excellent utility HeidiSQL to maintain it. Mariadb doesn't have reporting capabilities which is a problem for me as I occasionally need to print lists of pictures. It is, of course, possible to create and display queries and I can save these to a linux file. However they need some formatting and importing them to Word, setting up the layout, checking it looks ok is a pain. Exporting csv data and reading into Excel is a comon way of processing records, but I am not keen on writing Excel macros to do this. I am sure there are lots of reporting packages I could use but that would be overkill.
I do have the capability to output a selection of records to a browser thanks to Tania Rascia's excellent tutorial. I use the web query to update descriptions in the database associated with pictures so I thought it would be worthwhile to see whether I am able to print reports. Usually printing from a web browser provides what you want but is messy due to screen formats being inappropriate but I thought some tailoring would be possible.
In fact it turns out to be a simple and effective solution. Clearly we want to use CSS to reformat our web page for printing. Using the @media CSS rule you can specify separate definitions for screen and print. My first experiment was to display screen text as blue and printed text as green.
To test output just choose print in the browser and you see the print version of the report in print preview
After that we can write print specific CSS to ensure the report is in landscape mode and that instructions and unnecessary screen text are hidden. I can also set up a print button on my screen.
A very satisfying solution to my problem.
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