Basic Report Building

We're revamping a report building feature for one of our products. It was interesting to see the similarities between all of the necessary reports:

1) DATA: The information for which you wish to analyze. For our system, its the number of applications submitted for services.

2) DATE RANGE: Filtering based on when the applications are submitted (for our system). Generically, the date range of when the process occurred to produce the data your querying.

3) BREAKDOWN: The interval at which to tally subtotals. For example, we wanted to see the number of appplications submitted monthly (or yearly, or weekly, or daily, quarterly, etc.)

I realized this pattern was similar across all of the reports we wanted to generate. This made the queries so much easier to consolidate and reuse. Hopefully, it will make the reports section of our product so much more valuable and usable. Its too bad I probably won't get see the finished project.