Which reporting tool is best?

nardmoseley

This is the title of a thread on the
borland.public.delphi.reporting-charting newsgroup.

Please feel free to let others know that they should be using ReportBuilder!



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

rbuser

Hello Nard,

There is another thread, not so obvious this one,
on b.p.d.nontech "C# reality check 2".

Somehow this thread has become side-tracked into attacking
Crystal Reports, and implicitly praising ReportBuilder.

Evidently, all Borland's efforts right now are going into Delphi
for dotNET, and IMHO soon Delphi notNet will become a
legacy product (this is IMHO only, not fact).

I notice that DevExpress, makers of ExpressQuantumGrid,
have versions for dotNET already.

Do you have more info about your plans for dotNET?
Last post I found was 2003-01-15, saying you are awaiting
release of Delphi for dotNet. But the great thing about dotNet
is that it is language neutral, so C#, VB, Delphi, C++, et al, will all
compile down to a CLR. So unlike before, where each sector
had its own component sets, in theory 3rd party components
can now be used by all languages! This could be a breakthrough
opportunity for ReportBuilder. It also means you should not
need to wait for Delphi dotNET to start work on this.

(One place to really think hard is the RAP language. I use it, it
is great, but IMHO it would have been better if you had
exposed RB objects by means of the COM object model,
rather than Delphi RTTI. This would allowed any
COM-compatible scripting language to be used. This will
be more important for dotNET, where you cannot rely on
all developers knowing Pascal syntax for RAP.)

I hope we will see a newly architected ReportBuilder for
dotNET, building on the best of RB for Delphi, but doing
things even better, and with the ability to be freely used with
all the dotNET development tools.

Regards,
Edward Benson.

rbuser

I don't really hope as much as many of you that ReportBuilder makes it's way into dotNet. Simply because I don't
think I'll switch into dotNet until a lot of years from now.

I am an application developper working for a small business. My team was asked to look into dotNet for
programming database driven applications the dotNet way. We have encountered lots and lots and of misses in the
technology. Disconnected database philosophy is one of them. Connect to the database, load everything from the
database in the application and then disconnect. This is bad for multi-tier application and takes a lot of time
to load forms when the having a huge amount of data.

The second problem is Cristal Report. Nothing to say here since the name itself can give nightmare to some of us.

An other thing is decompilers. We don't sell the source code of our application and the dotNet decompilers are
very efficient in reproducing code. Mainly because of dotNet uncompiled binaries (IL code). Decompilers like
Salamander (http://www.remotesoft.com/salamander/) can uncompile code in a scary way for small business like
mine.

Even though I'm not hoping for a dotNet version of report builder. It will probably be a good choice for Digital
Metaphors to do a version of their highly praised reporting tool.

As for myself, I'll see what the futur brings to us.

Cheers

--
Daniel Lemire

rbuser

Hi,

Apart from speed, other factors are also important.

The question in a case like this, ask: Did the product passed the test of
time? Analogue to this argument: Take the SAS software on the IBM
mainframes. My first encounter with it was in 1980. Now my daughter, doing
her Honors degree in Financial Mathematics, is using version 9 of SAS on her
PC!

Have a look at the documentation and availability of examples. For this
reason I did not choose Rave Reports.

Also have a look if the product is a category winner in Delphi Informant
magazine (www.delphizine.com). Here ReportBuilder shines.

Can you use the product in IntraWeb environment. Products like
PsRBExportDevices from www.pragnaan.com make it possible to use
ReportBuilder as an IntraWeb reporting tool.

What about graphics. Does the reporting tool integrates TeeChart or
TeeChart Pro (ReportBuilder 7.02 accommodates TeeChart or TeeChart Pro v.6)

The last bit of advice: Have a look at the product's newsgroups: Are the
requests for advice speedily answered? Also have a look in the newsgroup
archives (www.tamaracka.com). In the search field, type the product name
(e.g. on ReportBuilder you will get more than 9660 and on Rave you will get
more than 6780 hits) and sort the results by date. Then you will get an
idea of how popular the product is and how quick you will get an answer on
requested advice.

My advice: ReportBuilder


Regards.