FastCube and ReportBuilder

rbuser

I purchased FastCube maybe a year ago to solve some issues that I could
not do in ReportBuilder. Now I have need to add more functionality
that involves calculations and printing the cube within a report layout.

Of course, because this is a Fast Reports product, they guide me toward
buying more products from them, such as FastScript and FastReport.

I have been very happy with ReportBuilder and do not want to move that
direction. Also, I am hesitant to provide both products to my user
because I think it would be confusing to have two reporting tools.

So my question is, has anyone ever looked at being able to incorporate
a FastCube into a ReportBuilder report? Can it be done, and if so, how?

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nicocizik

Hi David,

We have not heard of anyone using FastCube in conjunction with
ReportBuilder but that does not mean it is impossible. The easiest
solution would be to somehow export the FastCube output as a metafile or
high quality bitmap, then display it on a report using a TppImage. This
is similar to the way many of our customers display TeeCharts (created
on forms) in their reports.

Another option, if FastCube has the ability to draw directly to a
TCanvas, you could use the TppPaintBox component inside a report and
draw to its canvas.

rbuser

The export options include XML, HTML, WORD, and EXCEL.

The Excel, Word, and HTML exports automatically create tables with
frames around the cells.

What I would be most interested in doing is getting the data so I could
use ReportBuilder to put whatever frames, labels, etc. around the data,
and so I could use RAP to add calculated fields from that data. Is
there a way to do this with the XML export from FastCube? I don't have
much experience working with XML, so I am not sure how to move forward
with that. Could the JITPipline component be used for this, or would a
different direction be better?

Fast Reports includes a component for including the cube in their
reports, so I suppose I could buy that just to learn what they are
doing and somehow translate that over to ReportBuilder using a
JITPipline? What are your thoughts?

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nicocizik

Hi David,

I'm sorry, I was under the impression that you wanted to print the
entire cross-tab created by FastCube on the report as-is.

If it's just the data you're after, the JITPipeline would definitely be
a valid option. Once the data is generated, you could use the
JITPipeline to pipe that data directly to ReportBuilder without the need
to export to any file type.

See demos 136 and 137 in the main reports demo for examples on how to
use the JITPipeline to access data structures in code.