Is a report any different than other application Views?

Is a report any different than other application Views? I don't think so. Your architecture should have several View/Renderer Engines and Controller/Processor Engines. When would you call "Report" any given View?

The Latin word "reportare" means "carry back". When we build reports as Software Engineers all we do is accept some parameters or a simple request and bring back a response with a specific format in a specific media. As it happens when we deliver a paper after a phone call in Software we deliver a pdf/excel/word file or embedded view in a native application or a website. It can be just plane or formatted text in a native application, a simple HTML fragment for a web application or website, and the list goes on.

But what is the difference between this "response" and any other application response? Is it that a report is created with a WYSIWYG application where datasets and a specific Domain Specific Language (SDL) is used? Is it that they take longer to be produced than a regular view?

IMO deciding what is a report and what is not is certainly difficult in some cases. For example if you ask a Microsoft Engineer for a report out of certain transformations that are necessary, the solution will include some SSIS and SSRS projects. Here you use two tools which hopefully you can combine behind a user interface and make it transparent to the user.

Any software application we build will have some kind of user interaction and a response to that user interaction (Even if some Views result from automated tasks and are sent as email attachments, they still have at a minimum some hardcoded setup and most likely some configuration to read before executing). I sustain that a report is not any different than any other application View. It needs a renderer engine and a processor engine. The combination of processors and renderers can result in the most complicated logic being executed and *reported* back to the user. The application *reports* constantly to the user.

Use any tool that makes sense to build your application Views. Call some of them "report" if you want. But at the end of the row you need View/Renderer Engines and Controller/Processor Engines available to "carry back" to application users the response they are expecting. The combination of these two engines give you the power to deliver an application structure that meets any demand without having to argue if what you are building is actually a "report". If you are carrying back information to the user you are reporting to the user.

ETL and Report tools are just that, tools. The architecture should not name components based on the tools being used.