Reporting

[marcia]

I was wondering if anyone could give me some info on reporting application successes/failures they've experienced. We are thinking of implementing Crystal Reports, but will also need something that creates pdf's (we are currently using pdf include).

I did a Crystal course today, and the trainer told me he prefers Access to Crystal for reporting purposes? I was amazed, haven't used Access for years, is it secure enough? We obviously want to prevent users from updating data through an ODBC connection. Is anyone using Access for reporting and is it secure?

If you are using Crystal, are you instantiating the Crystal Viewer or are you running your reports off a web server? Can anyone make some useful comparisions to Actuate, is that a better way to go?

Thanks, all info helps!

 

[RealHeavyDude]

AFAIK Progress is ( or was at least 2 years ago ) an official Crystal partner. IIRC you could directly purchase your Crystal license from your Progress sales rep, but I have to admit that I don't if that would be wise.

Your trainer, obviously, is not very sharp. If he prefers Access as data source for reporting then he probably has never heard that something like a data warehouse or security considerations could possibly exist.

If you are using the OpenEdge AppServer and the .NET open client there is even an option accessing the AppServer utilizing the ProDataSet instead of connecting the database directly. That way you don't even need to disclose your database schema to the Crystal.


Heavy Regards, RealHeavyDude.

 

[marcia]

Thanks!

It seems that Crystal now belongs to SAP. I'm not sure if that means Progress is no longer a partner?

Unfortunately we are still using v91c!

I agree with you, I'm not sure the trainer is entirely clued up on the world of reporting. He wasn't talking about using Access as a datasource, but as a reporting tool. I'm going to try them both out and see where it takes me!

Regards
M

 

[cj_brandt]

If you are using 91c, I wouldn't bother doing anything via SQL in the progress db. It is very slow for anything but the most basic queries.

 

[RealHeavyDude]

I can only second that ...

... and 9.1c is almost 10 years old software, it's buggy, lacks lots of features and most of all, is unsupported. IIRC, the SLQ engine was reinvented somewhere around 9.1c or 9.1d. For that reason and since it's the only supported version in V9 you should at least upgrade to 9.1e. But you should upgrade to OpenEdge 10 as soon as possible.


Heavy Regards, RealHeavyDude.

 

[marcia]

Actually, sorry I'm wrong, our DB is on 91e. We are planning to make the big move to 10 at some point, it's just not as simple as we thought since we are still using SmartObjects, a lot of our screens need to be rewritten before we can do that.

 

[RealHeavyDude]

I've migrated tons of Dynamics and ADM2 applications from Progress V9 to OpenEdge 10. Never was there a need to rewrite everything - a plain re-compile did in almost all cases.

But - it all depends whether you use the "freezed" version of the framework as it was when your application was developed or you want to upgrade the framework at the same time. That could mean that you need to make small adjustments here and there but nothing big - far from re-write.


Heavy Regards, RealHeavyDude.

 

[marcia]

We've been wanting to get rid of smartObjects for a while, we have major bandwidth issues here, and smartObjects are definitely not as bandwidth friendly as they were intended to be (to put it mildly). We did an exercise where we tried to move to v10, and after a few weeks of trying to fix the errors we were getting (can't remember offhand what they were), we had to call it a day move back to more urgent projects. Unfortunately we are only 4 developers working for an end user, so it's not always so easy to get the move to v10 to the top of the priority list! But we definitely haven't given up on it completely and hope to do it soon.

 

[vdennis]

It will work there are a lot of things to consider, like are you going to run CRServer? I been using CR with progress for about 10 years now and in most cases it will work just fine. But if you are going to try and populate reports on the fly you will have a problem. Since Crystal Reports 10 there has not been support for the ActiveX without installing it from a CR9 package. It has to do with using the RDC, as CR calles it. If you plan to only used pre-populated reports you can CR 2008 Viewer. If not, I can send you two differenct copies of an install program that will allow the 'host' machine to populate blank reports. Using the ActiveX commands you can select records, outputs, sort, pass parameters, and stuff like that from Progress. Let me know if you are interested.

-Dennis Voegler
Adams-Burch

 

[Mark_Barr]

We have a reporting and business intelligence package that allows you to export reports to PDF. Have you decided on a product yet, maybe we could help you?

 

[vdennis]

There is a really good product, 4gl based, that is the closest thing I have seen to a progress report builder. It will allow the use of temp-tables, looks a lot like PDF's on the output, and can be customized to allow the end user to move stuff around and full dynamic use of images. The product is Aurora Analytics from CornerStar out of Portland. Saw their demo in October and it was impressive.
-Dennis-