How to write 4 reports with AI in Fishbowl
This video is the result of almost 18 years of Fishbowl experience. My first iReport development was for a medical device company, writing Fishbowl reports by hand. Now anyone can ask for a report in a chat app and get it in Fishbowl.
In this demo I use a standard Claude account with Opus 5.5, connected to Fishbowl through ILC MCP. I ask one question, how many open picks do we have, and turn the answer into all four kinds of Fishbowl reports. Then there’s a bonus.
1. Data module query
The prompt was simple: how many open picks do we have, and make a Data module query for it. It came back with eight open picks, and the query was in the Data module ready to run.
The Data module doesn’t get used much. I still see customers with no queries in it at all. It’s where I send people who want data they can use in Excel. Lately customers export from there and drag the file into Claude to analyze it. This skips that step, and it works on your live Fishbowl database. More on this: Can your AI assistant run your Fishbowl Data module queries?
2. CloudPage
Next: “Can you make it into a CloudPage? I want to preview it first.”
I built CloudPages about four years ago. Fishbowl is going to go cloud at some point, and customers need a way to move what they’ve done in Jasper reports into something more cloud-native. It’s a custom module with our own technology for tabular reports, and we’ve been teaching AI how to build them.
You’re not inside Fishbowl yet while you work with the AI, so you get a preview first. We’re a single warehouse, so I told it I didn’t need the location group column. The preview updates as it goes.
When it looked right: “Great, install it into my Fishbowl.” I hit refresh in CloudPages and there it was.
More on this: Can an AI assistant build a Fishbowl CloudPage?
3. Jasper report
Maybe you don’t want CloudPages and you want the standard Fishbowl experience. So: “Can you make that as a Jasper report, but I want to edit the layout.”
Fishbowl’s Reports module uses the Jasper Reports engine. It’s been around a long time and hasn’t been updated, so it’s hard to bring new people onto. I’ve taught a lot of people how to do it, and if you’re not a developer it’s tricky. But many of the standard Fishbowl reports still use it, and if you print packing lists and that sort of thing, you need it. So we support it.
The hardest part is the editor itself. So we made our own that runs in the browser. We started it last year, shelved it for a while and picked it back up. It’s connected to the MCP, so when I changed the title to “Open Picks - for Shipping,” it saved straight back to the draft.
Then I told it: “I have saved changes. Please install it into my Fishbowl.” It compiled the report, which is the technical step that makes it ready for Fishbowl, then asked me where it should go. I picked the Picking folder and just the Reports module.
That’s the part that matters. AI can vaguely understand Fishbowl from its training, but telling it exactly how Fishbowl works is what lets it do this.
More on this: Can an AI assistant build a Fishbowl Jasper report?
4. BI Report
And if you don’t want any of those, we support BI Report too. BI Report is what inspired CloudPages, and we took that idea and built on it. “Now make it into a BI Report.” I popped over to BI Report, looked for Open Picks, and there it was.
More on this: Can an AI assistant build a Fishbowl BI Report?
Bonus: a dashboard on a TV
Over the years we’ve had a lot of requests for dashboards. We’d build them, and they’re great, but they can be fussy to set up. I’ve always wanted to take an Android TV, like a Google TV, point it at a website and push things to it. The MCP can do that now.
The TV opens our TV page and shows a code. Most TVs have kiosk apps for that kind of thing. I asked Claude to adopt the TV code, then: “Can you make a dashboard for picking operations like we did earlier with the CloudPage?” In a minute or two it had a preview. I told it to publish to the dashboard screen, and it showed up on the TV.
We just finished this, and it’s still beta, so it needs time to get better. The idea is a TV in the operations area and one in manufacturing that you change by talking to it, with things like messages and the weather.
Wrap-up
The MCP understands all four major ways to write reports in Fishbowl. We used to get a lot of report requests and had to push them down the list. I want people to be able to write their own.
A lot of this used to cost too much to be worth doing. If you have ideas, or problems you’ve always wanted to solve, reach out. We want to hear them. And if you want help picking which kind of report fits, Why I probably won’t write a report ever again goes through that.
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