I am having a hard time figuring out a solution to the following reporting issue. I used to do something similar using SAP Business Objects but am with a different org now and have different resources/software available. It seems like a common issue/function, but I am having a hard time finding information about it online. Perhaps I am missing some nomenclature on what this is called. A description of what I'd like to accomplish is listed below followed by some pointed questions.
Essentially, I'd like to automatically create a report for each row in a table based on a template. In other words, I'd like to design a report template that references certain columns from the table, and then automatically create a copy of each report for each primary key. I have about 300 rows, so I am trying to avoid manually exporting 300 versions of reports that are from the exact same template. For example, the header will contain that row's value from column 1, the right side will have the value from column 2, etc. Ideally, I'd like this solution to automatically generate an individual PDF version of each report. My workflow would essentially be: build a report template, pick a table to iterate over, and choose a directory to create the PDFs in.
Can this be accomplished with SSRS or Tableau? These are the resources I currently have access to.
If the above can't accomplish this, what kind of programs can do this?
I have the files from someone who completed this task in the past. The PDFs' properties tell me that they came from InDesign- does InDesign have this capability?
What is this function commonly called? It seems like it should be a common task in reporting, but I am having a hard time finding info about it online. I've been calling it "Iterative Printing", or simply saying that it is similar to Microsoft's "Mail Merge"
From an InDesign Automation Expert point of view, there are several ways of automating such a datamerge from simple to advanced needs. InDesign indeed offers a native datamerge tool which is rather efficient and simple to use. However it doesn't offer nor conditional processing nor updates. If you are adventurous, you can consider XML within InDesign, which is also a native feature. XLST can then brings conditional processing but it definitively increases complexity in teh workflow. Finally the tool I generally recommend is EasyCatalog because it's really powerful and smooth. The only hiccup is that it's not a true VDP plugin. If you generate 10k pages, it will not be optimized as a VDP plugin would do. So it's really up to you depending on your needs. Feel free to get in touch with us at ozalto.com if you want more infos on these tools.