A few years back I took a look at reporting tool options for U2. I'm
thinking of doing that again, possibly broadening the scope to all MV
platforms. I can think of mvQuery, Entrinsik Informer, MITS, Sierra
Bravo, and Visage' (is the reporting tool ever licensed separately?).
What else is out there for U2? What do people use with jBASE,
Revelation, D3? Are there any such tools that work with OpenQM?

Thanks for any help getting an initial list. If you would be willing
to chat with me by phone or e-mail about what you know about any of
these products, let me know that too.

Thanks. --dawn

On 6 Feb 2006 18:39:09 -0800, "dawn" <dawnwolthuis (AT) gmail (DOT) com> wrote:

And, while you're at it, could you also explain (briefly and without
worrying about pro/con on-going never-ending arguments - at least from
me) why you chose to write/implement/use such a reporting
tool?........

Bruce Nichol
Talon Computer Services
ALBURY NSW Australia

http://www.taloncs.com.au

If it ain't broke, fix it until it is....

I wrote a reporting tool for D3 - Pick Query which you can download for
free www.ramto.com
Peter

dawn wrote:

Bruce Nichol wrote:
Just to be clear, are you asking folks why they woud choose any such
tool rather than either writing their own similar tool or using only
the mv query language for end-user reporting? Would this be along the
same lines as asking why anyone ever buys software?

I'm just a little confused, so please give more hints about your
interests. thanks. --dawn

On 6 Feb 2006 19:25:07 -0800, "dawn" <dawnwolthuis (AT) gmail (DOT) com> wrote:

Not at all. I'm not *that* devious. I'm just curious about the
reasons behind MV reporting tools. Their use and their raison d'etre.
For me, gone are the days of "ad hoc" reporting. I've never been
exposed to "native to MV" reporting tools, per se - always done 'em
"longhand". We've just come out the other side of a rewrite of our
application to QM.... We rid ourselves of dozens of PROCS, built
sentences into programs and execute them... Used a bit of 20/20
hindsight halfway through and went back and re-wrote (most of) the
earlier converts.... did away with all the A-type DICT items from
yesterday (I- and D-types only now), Found out more about FMT, EVAL
and all that sort of stuff to rid ourselves of countless DICT
items.....

<Aside> We're now making vast use of Martin's PAN and SCROLL for
screen-based reports, as well as, more latterly, his PCL and OVERLAY
for hard-copy reports. Customers seem to be pretty happy with the
"new" hard-copy reports - page borders, heading borders, boxes
wherever they're "wanted".....round-cornered borders and boxes, at
that.... Can't wait until we foist our new "coloured" screen
reports on 'em
</Aside>

Our customers come forward occasionally with a "new" report request. I
suppose I've done hundreds of 'em over the years.... I can't recall a
customer telling me of his "own" report any time in the past (quite a)
few years.... Tend not to promote "do your own reports" too heavily.
That's *our* job... We need the money. *They* need to run their own
business to pay for us to enhance things... <grin>
Perhaps we've got a "perfect" solution (Ho Ho), but "reports" don't
seem to rise above the horizon these days....

I was wondering if today's approach of "front end/back end database"
processing brings the need for "MV native reporting tools" or,
alternatively, the need for "middleware" to fit into (ugh!) SQL and
its ..... children (Crystal Reports, et al) The "front end/back
end" style tends not to be part of our customers' concerns, either
..... at the moment....
You want to know "what". I thought I'd like to know "why" - just to
try to get a handle on what might be coming at me.... and what I might
look to doing about it all.....

If I ever pull my head out of the sand.....

Regards,

Bruce Nichol
Talon Computer Services
ALBURY NSW Australia

http://www.taloncs.com.au

If it ain't broke, fix it until it is....

Sort of in response to Dawn and Bruce.

No surprise to anyone I'm sure, I'm starting to standardize on .NET as
a sort of universal conduit to other products and environments. So
specific tools, as always, aren't important to me, I can connect MV
data to pretty much anything that has a .NET plug, which is an awful
lot of products these days. People give me grief because when people
ask "how do I do X" my response is frequently regarding some component
of .NET. It's not that I'm a Microsoft clone, the fact is that over
many years they've seen what the market needs and they've built it
into a unified framework.

So with that in mind, I've started to look into the ReportViewer and
related components in Visual Studio. Crystal Reports are relatively
easily developed from VS as well. And it looks like Microsoft
Reporting Services has made its mark in the business community so I'll
be getting involved with that very soon too, as a product and using it
through apps built in Visual Studio. This stuff isn't rocket science.
If a company needs attractive thick or thin client for most MV
platforms, we can use mv.NET to do the connectivity - and that data
can be combined with other MV or relational databases, XML, data
retrieved live via Web Services, and other data sources.
To summarize: you can get very professional looking reports which
aggregate data from multiple sources, rendered in thick apps or
browsers, for D3, jBASE, U2, mvBASE, Reality, and other platforms.

Not that this qualifies as a real "tool" but the .NET 2.0 grids that
come with Visual Studio are much more robust than their predecessors,
even some commercial offerings. And some third-party vendors just
continue to make better and better UI components which make for really
nice reports via ASP.NET.

Unrelated to .NET, there is a product that I have been considering
marketing which allows plain "greenbar" reports to be run through a
processor and converted into very attractive reports with images,
lines, boxes, and fonting - much like Bruce mentioned. It also moves
data around and generates subtotals etc - all without modifying a
single line of the MV code that generates the original report. The
same software will drive high-end Xerox machines to staple, bind, and
sort reports, collate reports from different sources, and even handle
scheduling for distribution. (What MV product does all that?) This
is absolutely magic for VARs who are proud of their "hundreds of
reports", which are probably as boring as they are informative.
(Warning, magic isn't cheap, this is for bigger end-users.)

Also Excel is itself a good reporting engine and as many of you know I
have a lot of experience driving Excel with MV data and generating
attractive sheets, charts, reports, etc.

So those are my preferred tools at the moment. I've always been
impressed with MITS as Business Intelligence and Reporting
environment. I was also impressed with Entrinsik Informer (per
recommendation from Dawn). Unfortunately Informer is U2-only and does
not do BI (reporting is not the same as BI despite what some people in
our market say about their products). If there was enough demand for
Informer for D3 or jBASE I'm sure they'd consider a port.

Inquiries about any of the above are welcome.
TG@ removethisNebula-RnD.com

Thanks Bruce for the positive comments.

Our goal within QM is to integrate as much as possible into the core
product, removing the need for additional components. We do not expect
to provide direct support for fancy graphical reports (at least, not in
the immediate future) but we already have extensions to the standard MV
reporting model for things such as panning, scrolling, direct CSV
output (conforming to RFC4180, unlike some others) and overlay graphics
for PCL printers. As Bruce indicated, displayed reports using colours
to highlight headings, totals, etc are on the way.

Picking up Tony's point, there is a .NET interface to QM about to be
announced but we will leave that to the vendor concerned. And, if you
like Excel as a reporting tool, it is trivial to export data from QM
into Excel in an automated way without the pain of ODBC.

Martin Phillips, Ladybridge Systems.

An interesting aside to Crystal Reports - which personally I hate is a
thread I'm followed recently in the microsoft.dotnet newsgroups which
suggested using MS Access as a front end reporting engine. Whilst I agree
the general opinion that as a database Access is very "low-end", as a
reporting engine it isn't bad at all... Better than Excel imho.

The problem is connectivity with MV... Access is slightly behind the curve
with regard to the "DotNet" stuff but I'm sure the next version will catch
up...

Certainly the concept of a MV specific reporting engine seems a little lame,
Generic reporting tools are much better at the "presentation" side of
things - it's just a case of getting the data to the reporting engine!
Microsoft have a product linked to SQLServer (but which I believe is
independent) which I believe goes under the banner of Microsoft Reporting
Services - I've not read up much yet, but I believe that this runs on a web
server and delivers report via http (I could be wrong here so don't take
this as gospel)

Just my 2 euros worth... I'm sure Dawn is still banking them.

Simon
"Tony Gravagno" <g6q3x9lu53001 (AT) sneakemail (DOT) com.invalid> wrote

Careful Peter - people will start commenting about the fact that you
might be spreading virii again ;-)

Dawn, I'm assuming that your comment re "are the reporting tools sold
seperately" was directed at Visage? If so, the answer is "yes" - you
can deploy the Visage.Reporter, and Visage.BIT (OLAP) seperately as
stand alone products - or part of a fully integrated application
solution stack. Likewise the Visage.Faxer and Visage.Emailer can be
used to send/receive faxes & emails from "anywehere", not just
Visage.Reporter

As luck would have it (?) we are having an internal training session on
Reporter tomorrow that we have already committed to recording for some
of our Vars - I'll convert this to flash and post a URL if anyone
interested & has an hour to kill.

Bruce, like you, we have also traditionally had hundreds of reports.
For example, we had 350+ standard reports in our Order Entry system
alone, but these have now been replaced with a single BIT cube, which
provides many more variations than we could possibly have contemplated
historically, even with a decent reporting tool. Users love the
interactive "data exploration" capabilities which you just can not
achieve with a "fixed" report.

Therefore, in redeveloping our R5 application, for the most part we
have elected to use Visage.Reporter as little more than a glorified
form designer for the most part, replacing hundreds of "standard"
reports with a few interactive BIT cubes, and from the reaction of our
users, I think this is spot on in most cases - but there is still a
place for a "good ol' hard copy" report (even if it ends up being
delivered as a PDF, HTML or even an Excel Spreadsheet

Ross Ferris wrote:
<snip>
I would take the hour to have a look (what else could I possibly do
with such time? ;-) but don't do the work just for me.

[OT] By the way, I have it on my list to figure out what is required to
convert video to a flash format and get that on the web. I have done
nothing with flash to date, but have worked with digital video in
quicktime and other formats. If you have any clues on what tools I
would need, let me know.

Thanks. --dawn