Evaluating Report Builder

rbuser

Looking to switch to ReportBuilder (RB) from Quick Reports (QR). I have
downloaded the demo and worked through some of the tutorials to get a rough
idea of how it works. Couple areas I need further clarification:

Inheritance - we have about 40 reports that use inheritance extensively in
QR. We want the same look and feel for headings, title area, sort breaks,
etc. How is inheritance handled in RB? Can I create a template that I
reuse and when changes are made to the template they are automatically
filtered down to every report?

Reports must be separate from code - We want the reports to be separate from
any code. How are the report file layouts stored? Can they each be in
their own file? Is it better to stored in one file for the project? Just
need a quick idea of the best way to store report files.

Preview feature - We would like to be able to allow the user to highlight a
line in the report and determine the data on that row so we can perform
other actions. Can this be done in standard RB where can highlight a row or
can we build our own preview to so we can provide that feature ourselves.

Thanks for your help.

Wayne

nicocizik

Hi Wayne,

Thanks for evaluating ReportBuilder.

1. Unfortunately ReportBuilder does not support template inheritance. As
an alternative you could place subreports in each of your descendant reports
and dynamically load the common title/header information as each report is
processed.

2. Using ReportBuilder, DADE, and RAP (Report Application Pascal) you can
keep your report completely separate from your application. DADE Enables
developers and end-users to visually design and preview SQL queries. All
this information is then saved locally in the report template so there is no
need to provide a connection to your database in your app. Using RAP, all
event handler code, among other code completely is contained inside the
report template. ReportBuilder Pro includes DADE and ReportBuilder
Enterprise includes DADE and RAP.

3. Take a look at the Text Search feature of the ReportBuilder Previewer.
This allows the user to search for a line of text within the preview. If
the given line of text is found, it will be highlighted and events are given
to perform other actions.

--

rbuser

On Wed, 15 Oct 2003 09:29:34 -0600, Nico Cizik (Digital Metaphors) wrote:


But you could inherit a reportexactly as you would with QuickReport.
Digital Metaphors say that they don't support it but it works pretty good
for me.

Julien

nardmoseley

For form based reports it will work in RB was well.

The limitation exists if you are saving/loading the report definitions to a
file or database. This applies to all end-user solutions.

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

rbuser

On Fri, 17 Oct 2003 14:48:51 -0600, Nard Moseley (Digital Metaphors) wrote:


That makes me think about a problem i have and I still didn't find the
solution.

I want to provide my users some reports and give them the ability to change
to report (create their own version of the standard ones). What I first
thought about was to include the report in the exe. The user can then save
the report to the database and modify it. If there's a version of the
report in the database, i print that one, if there is no version in the
database, I print the standard report.

Everything works fine until I change the standard report, if I remove or
rename some field in my database or if I remove some event to the standard
report, the customised version won't load anymore ...

Is there a way to load a report even if there is some missing field or
event ?

Julien

nardmoseley

If the save report definition contains a reference to an event-handler
method that no longer exists in, then you should receive a warning dialog,
select the ignore button will enable to report to load.

Any DBText or data-aware controls that contain a reference to a missing
datafield should be able to load as well.



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