Very disappointed in report builder :-(

rbuser

While your product works well when setup, the demos really suck, especially
for Interbase/Firebird.
The IBO demo would only work after changing the uses list in serveral
places and deleting stuff elsewhere.
Then, in the readme for the IBO demo it did not mention anywhere that the
rbIBO66.dpk has to be installed to get IBsession to show up in the session
type property.
My god, all you had to do was mention this fact in the readme.doc, it could
have saved us hours, not to mention that it appears that the demos have not
been updated in at least 2 years. RB 6.03 was released in november of 2001
and I am sure these did not work then either.

The IB express demo does not work right either, and there is no way for me
to fix that.

I hope the demo readme.doc get updated and a patch gets released to address
the IBX issue.
We paid a lot of money for the enterprise edition and I expected demos that
worked.

Thanks,

Tony Caduto
M&I Trust Company
Milwaukee WI

digitalmetaphors

I just downloaded and installed IBX 6.03. The auto incremented values
weren't coming back after we posted a new record for the new report
template. It would come back as NULL when we tried to query it and this
would blow up in the report explorer. If you set the the end user demo
project's TIBTable.ForcedRefreshed := True, then it will work.


Cheers,

Jim Bennett
Digital Metaphors

rbuser

digitalmetaphors

Lauchlan,

I spent a couple of hours today, out of my development time, downloading and
installing IBX 6.03 and IBO and figuring out why they didn't work with the
RB 6.03 demos. Now, the demos are working here on my machine and the
problems have been solved (it is working correct for me here on my machine).
I'll put together a couple of new downloads of these demos, which have been
updated to work out-of-the-box with the latest components available.

The Developer's Guide is in its 3rd Edition. I have one sitting on my desk
and it is 437 pages large. It is available for order from our website.
Have you read your installed Developer's Guide (2nd Ed.) ? We have demos in
the installation and custom coded demos which we do for free as a service to
help our customers out. There are also over a hundred TechTips in the
newsgroups. Yes, we are actively out on our newsgroups answering questions.
Lately, many of them have been yours. You can search in your news reader on
headers and in message bodies. OutlookExpress can do this.

We have thousands of customers, and we try to solve problems as fast as we
can, while developing the product at the same time. In our opinion, we
provide world class service that is hard to find anywhere else.

Please, feel free to express your opinions on what new features we should
have by sending us an email to info@digital-metaphors.com or
support@digital-metaphors.com


Cheers,

Jim Bennett
Digital Metaphors

rbuser

> The Developer's Guide is in its 3rd Edition. I have one sitting on my
desk
in
to
questions.
on

Given that I just bought Report Builder Enterprise within the last week and
a half, and explicitly had it shipped rather than downloaded just so I could
get a printed copy of the manual (developers guide 2nd edition) and paid
A$140 for shipping plus an extra A$200 tax at customs, ie, an extra
approximately A$340 just to get the printed 2nd edition manual, I am not
pleased to be told that the developers guide is now (a week or so later) in
its third edition.


I have no issues with your newsgroup support. It is terrific, the only
problem of course is that from Australia you guys seem to be active between
12 midnight and 8 in the morning by my local time, so there is a lag cycle
such that it takes a day for each question/answer cycle. You can't help your
time zones for your customers though. .

With newsgroups and searching, perhaps you could forward your archives to
google or something so we can use googles search. I don't see how to do
anything similar in OE, and anyway it only keeps messages current within the
last month or so.

Regards,

Lauchlan M.

rbuser

Jim,
That sounds great, can you post here when you put the demos on the web?
I would greatly appreciate it.

Thanks,

Tony Caduto

digitalmetaphors

Here are the new demos which should work. Thanks for reporting the issues.

The updated IBX 6.03 Enduser demo project:
http://www.digital-metaphors.com/tips/RBIBX603EUDemo.zip


The updated IBO 4.2 Enduser demo project with DADE plugin :
http://www.digital-metaphors.com/tips/RBIBOEUDemo.zip


Cheers,

Jim Bennett
Digital Metaphors

digitalmetaphors

Yes, we have researched going to HTML newsgroup forums so that more
customers can access the newsgroups, but haven't made any decisions to
switch yet.

Our records indicate that you ordered when we were away at BorCon. We first
released the 3rd Edition at the show. Currently we are out of stock of the
latest Developer Guides. I'm sending an email to the sales and shipping
department about you getting the 3rd edition. We're working on a PDF which
you will be able to download in the near future.


Cheers,

Jim Bennett
Digital Metaphors

rbuser

"Lauchlan" wrote in message news:3d06be3f@dm500....
the

You can search the RB newsgroups at http://www.tamaracka.com.

Mike

rbuser

> Yes, we have researched going to HTML newsgroup forums so that more
first
the
which

Thanks Jim. Lisa has contacted me in this regard.

rbuser

I have to reiterate what Tony was saying, but maybe in a slightly different
context.

When a prospective client is evaluating a demo or evaluation version of a
product is it ESSENTIAL that the tutorials and demo applications work! That is
all they have to evaluate your product on. They do not know how it works, they
do not know if it even works, and they certainly don't know if it will work for
them. You need to babysit them, sell them!

I can't tell you how many products I have abandoned because I could not get
them to work for me. One stellar example comes to mind where the demos had not
been updated for two versions, the documentation was terrible, and to even ask
for help as an evaluator meant I had to sign up for and pay for a support
contract! Do you think I bought that product? Too bad too, because I think
(think) it is a very good product (and yes, I am talking about a third party
Delphi component).

I did buy RB because at the time it came with a very good tutorial and manual
(PDF). That tutorial is almost useless now, and I have not seen a new one
since. Maybe there is one, I just have not seen it. I still use my Second
Edition Guide but I know there are tonnes of changes and additions since then.

And on the upside, support in this newsgroup has been outstanding, timezone lag
aside .

Bruce

digitalmetaphors

Soon, we should have the Developer's Guide, 3rd Edition, in PDF format which
you can download from our website.

We did test our demos before releasing RB 6.03. If the component/product
changes which these demos rely upon, then yes, it could break something. We
can't prevent this from happening. When this does happen, we are quickly
notified of the problem, and we look into it. For example, we have a
Teechart wrapper which lets you use Teecharts in ReportBuilder. Whenever a
new version of TeeChart is released, undoubtedly, the interface to Teechart
changes, and we have to rebuild our wrapper and build a new release of
ReportBuilder solely to support Teechart in your favorite reporting tool:)

Between releases where problems like this occur, we can only hope that an
evaluator of ReportBuilder will contact (for free)
support@digital-metaphors.com or get on our newsgroups about problems they
are experiencing in order to get them resolved. We'll send them a patch
(you can buy RB to get the source, install the patch, and test. You can the
30-day money back guarantee if it doesn't work) or direct them to a
workaround until the next maintenance release.

Thankyou for the kind words about the newsgroup.


Cheers,

Jim Bennett
Digital Metaphors