Progress 9 ReportBuilder reports

Posted by goo on 02-Nov-2016 15:14

I am looking into a Progress v.9 application for a company, and I want to upgrade to latest version of OpenEdge (11.6). They have lots of reports running in ReportBuilder. 

The system is running on a windows 2003 server.

I want to put the client on a windows server 2008R2/2012 Termina Server, and the DB will run on a linux platform. 

Is it possible to have the reports still run with ReportBuilder instans? If not, what would you think will be the easiest way to convert the reports? There are some images printed in the reports.

//Geir Otto

OpenEdge Development - Forum

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Posted by smat-consulting on 02-Nov-2016 19:51

One of my clients is/was using ReportBuilder as well, and I helped them move to V11.1 (from Windows to Windows Server 2012R2).

You can continue to run the reportBuilder reports. However, you can not make any changes to them anymore, nor add new ones.

We did not find any decent, economical way to move to ANY reporting solution for V11! There are plenty of products that allow you to create great reports with drill-downs and all - but only in the browser, with no easy, real way of ensuring these reports actually can be printed. We decided to use pdf-include to design the few forms that we have, and go back in time 20 years to simple text-based, manually written ABL text-file reports. Terrible solution - but the only thing that seemed to work.

(PS: Just as I was starting to talk to Marian Edu about one of his tools (which might have been a solution) the client decided to scale down the operation that used this system - so we stopped investigating any further. But, maybe you can pick up with him where I left off...

At another client they used vpxPrint - a french product specifically (I think) for OpenEdge. I don't remember a visual designer for it, though, which made it not feasible as report-builder replacement.)

Good luck! And do post what you find... Thank you!

PPS: most of the "new" report tools are using SQL to get at the OpenEdge data, which seemed a rather flaky setup as you never know when it might hit one of those stupid SQL-length issues. But, you might find a workaround for that (running the sql-length fixer every 5 minutes or so?)... It's just a nuisance, and a real hassle to get a report working in the first place...

Posted by marian.edu on 03-Nov-2016 01:30

Well, Geir Otto… there was a session in Noordwijk about reporting that you should have attended maybe :)


There are many solutions each with it’s own strengths so in the end it’s all about your specific requirements, since the platform is Windows then would say you might find DataPA or Combit as a good replacement or if you fancy some open-source solution we do have quite some experience in that area with Jasper, Birt, Pentaho and have everything integrated inside 4GL environment.

The slides of the sessions should come online on EMEA PUG Challenge’s web site (if not there already), if you want to find more about the Java reporting solution you can contact me directly… who knows, maybe with that occasion we can have that talk about akera.io (‘scale-out’) if you didn’t move to PAS (’scale-up’) already ;)

Best,
 
Marian Edu

Acorn IT 
+40 740 036 212

Posted by Mike Fechner on 03-Nov-2016 01:44

The report builder runtime should still be there on OpenEdge 11.6.

I am not 100℅ sure, but it might be limited to 32bit.

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Posted by James Palmer on 03-Nov-2016 04:02

The slide decks for the EMEA PUG Challenge 2016 are indeed up already - onedrive.live.com/

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