end user reports and midas

rbuser

I have a midas application that I need to add reporting to. From the main
application client I would like to display the report explorer just to give
the user the reports that they can run and turn off all of the designer
stuff. I will then build a different application to let a admin user design
the reports. When the user selectes a report from the report explorer in
the thin client app, I want to ask the middle tier to execute the report and
return a stream of the generated report to display in the veiwer. I have
this part already working. The part that I'm having some difficult with is
with the auto search fields. If a report is defined with an auto search
value then the client has to be able to ask the middle tier what the auto
search fields are for a specific report and then display a dialog to collect
the values. Once the values are collected then I can call the middle tier
and set each value and run the report. I know how to get the auto search
fields that are define in a report but I'm not sure how I can build a dialog
on the client to display and set these values. One idea I had was to create
a new report at runtime and add the auto search fields that I get back from
the middle tier so that the client can then display the standard report
builder auto search dialog. I haven't tried this yet. If anyone has any
other ideas on ways of running reports from a remote server that would be
great.

Thanks,

Eric Lyons

nardmoseley

Check out ReportBuilder Server Edition. It does all of this already. It
contains ClientReportExplorer and ClientReport components that can be used
to browse available reports and then preview/print. It supports AutoSearch.

It is very simple to get a report server application up and running.
Probably take you one day to get it working.

You can download a demo from the following link. The Developers Guide
contains step by step tutorials for building a server application. There is
also a full set of demos installed.

http://www.digital-metaphors.com/Subpages/Downloads/trialversionsServ.html

Here is an overview of the functionality that is included.

http://www.digital-metaphors.com/Subpages/Products/Server/features.html




--
Nard Moseley
Digital Metaphors
http://www.digital-metaphors.com

nardmoseley

I should probably add that the server is multi-threaded and supports
incremental on demand paging to the client. This increases performances
drammatically. The ClientReport caches pages that it recieves from the
server so that if the user decides to print from preview, it has only to ask
for any additional pages that the user has not already viewed.


--
Nard Moseley
Digital Metaphors
http://www.digital-metaphors.com

rbuser

Nard,

I did look at the server edition and that is exactly what I would like to
have in a perfect world. But the deployment cost doesn't work for us. I
realize the cost of the server edition is small compared to some of the
other reporting tools but it is still a little high for us. So that leds me
back to trying to reinvent the wheel. I just need some simple support for
the autosearch parameters. I almost have it working except that when I
click the ok button in the autosearch dialog, it tries to vaildate the
values so it tries to connect to the db but the client doens't have a db
connection. I'm thinking that I have to write my own dialog descendant so
that it doesn't validate on the client side but on the server side.

Thanks,

Eric Lyons

nardmoseley

1. The deployment cost is minimal. The cost is $250 per CPU - that supports
an unlimited number of users.

2. Try tracing the RB source code. RB Server uses the same AutoSearch
dialog. I think the issues are elsewhere. Probably in TppReport. You
probabaly need to write some code to create and show the autosearch dialog
manually.


--
Nard Moseley
Digital Metaphors
http://www.digital-metaphors.com