Reporting solution recommendations?

Posted by keithg on 27-Jan-2015 11:54

We're looking at replacing our long-time use of VSView (now called "VSPrinter") with something else, following problems with their latest version running under OE 11 and a lack of support from the vendor.  I'm leaning toward creating a library for generating HTML output, though HTML was never meant for paginated documents.  PDFinclude is also an option, although it looks to be pretty complex and appears to have not been updated in nearly five years.

So I'm soliciting recommendations for (or against) a reporting system.  Any comments on this?

All Replies

Posted by Brian K. Maher on 27-Jan-2015 11:57

Combit List & Label ??
 
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From: keithg [mailto:bounce-keithg@community.progress.com]
Sent: Tuesday, January 27, 2015 12:55 PM
To: TU.OE.Development@community.progress.com
Subject: [Technical Users - OE Development] Reporting solution recommendations?
 
Thread created by keithg

We're looking at replacing our long-time use of VSView (now called "VSPrinter") with something else, following problems with their latest version running under OE 11 and a lack of support from the vendor.  I'm leaning toward creating a library for generating HTML output, though HTML was never meant for paginated documents.  PDFinclude is also an option, although it looks to be pretty complex and appears to have not been updated in nearly five years.

So I'm soliciting recommendations for (or against) a reporting system.  Any comments on this?

Stop receiving emails on this subject.

Flag this post as spam/abuse.

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Posted by Tim Kuehn on 27-Jan-2015 12:02

On Tue, Jan 27, 2015 at 12:54 PM, keithg
wrote:
> PDFinclude is also an option,
> although it looks to be pretty complex and appears to have not been updated
> in nearly five years.

I recently discovered an Apache PDF project:
https://pdfbox.apache.org/

It's all Java - it'd be interesting to see if there was a way to get
it to talk to an OE platform.

Posted by gdb390 on 27-Jan-2015 13:05

Good experiences with Crystal Reports !

Posted by Marian Edu on 27-Jan-2015 13:09

DataPA can do reporting (and more), if *nix environment or looking for a cheap solution check out Birt/Jasper Reports.

Posted by keithg on 27-Jan-2015 16:11

I should have mentioned this will need to be incorporated into a system running V9.1 on Windows.

Posted by Thomas Mercer-Hursh on 27-Jan-2015 17:13

I.e., with your hands tied behind your back ...

Posted by James Palmer on 28-Jan-2015 02:30

Sorry, I don't mean to be rude, but why are you bothered that PDFInclude hasn't been updated in 5 years when you're trying to link to an even older version of Progress that's obsolete? Please, please, please do everything you can to get yourself moved up to at least 10.2B08, or even 11.X. The benefits far outweigh the barriers.

Posted by ian4eto on 28-Jan-2015 02:52

You can check out Telerik Reporting. It has HTML5 Viewer with build-in paging, PDF export, and many more features.

And probably if you share more about your requirements and use cases, we will be able to give you better suggestions.

Posted by ke@iap.de on 28-Jan-2015 04:49

I feel free to name Viper here: www.tools4progress.com/.../viper

Viper is available for OE 8.x to 11.x, printing is very technical and managed by your code. But you can have some report templates with formatting (Designer). Runtimes are available for Windows and Unix/Linux. It is under development.

My company is selling this, so there may be some prejudice in this post :)

Posted by tbergman on 28-Jan-2015 05:20

While not exactly a reporting solution, if your goal is to easily create printable documents or PDF files, VPE from IdealSoftware works very well, even in older versions of Progress. I'm currently using it in V11.3.

Many years ago I chose this product over VSView but they were certainly competitive at that point. The company still exists and upgrades the product regularly. I recently needed to upgrade to 64 bit and was please to see that I could.

The software comes with a Progress demo (that I wrote over 20 years ago). It is incredibly fast at what it does.

A demo version is available. I have no connection with the company and am a paying customer.

https://www.idealsoftware.com/

Posted by blichal on 28-Jan-2015 07:12

You might also want to try the free docxfactory project.

It's free, powerful and really fast.

I'm finishing support for charts now and I'll be open sourc'ing the project.

Posted by keithg on 29-Jan-2015 13:05

Regarding upgrading the customer system from V9.1: 

Believe me, we have attempted that, over and over again.  There is a longer story here but it's out of our hands, controlled by those at the customer site that write the checks.

This thread is closed