Crystal Reports experience

Has anybody used Crystal Reports and Dolphin together.  Were you able
to:

1.  Produce reports using data from objects (not from tables).
2. Use a preview pane of the report.

Any other suggestions regarding report options?  I assume that html
generation is not an option as the reports must have pagination,
header, & footer control.


Thanks

Edward Stow

As nobody has replied I will try a broader question:

What are you using to produce printed reports?

Is HTML an option for good quality printed reports.

Any experiences please?


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> As nobody has replied I will try a broader question:

I have looked into using Crystal Reports, but I have not yet had to use it.
Our current reporting approach seems to be OK, and I am not sure if it makes
more sense to try to enhance our existing framework or switch to Crystal
Reports.

I found that Crystal Reports looked like it had too much of a relational
database bias.  Sure it can report on XML, but it looked like "me too"
functionality (I think you have to use their driver that emulates a
relational database on the XML data, it looked too involved and a bit of a
mess).  You can also use their CDO (Crystal Data Objects) ActiveX stuff to
print from data in memory.  This is probably the approach I would take with
Dolphin, however I am concerned about the efficiency of this approach.   It
looked a bit like throwing everything into arrays.  Another option might be
to create a temporary report database and report on it.  I did not delve
very deeply into Crystal Reports as it looked like it would take too much
time to evaluate it properly.  If someone does stop and take the time to try
Crystal Reports with Dolphin I would love to hear about their experiences.

Does anyone know of a real object centric reporting framework that might
work well from Dolphin?

> What are you using to produce printed reports?

We are using RTF files for text reports.  I found a simple RTF stream class
and expanded it to support more formatting.  I can set tab stops, and
control font sizes.  The reports look best if opened in MS Word, but will
also display in WordPad, or even in the Dolphin RTF control.  Unless you use
MS Word I don't think you can do vertical lines and graphics.  It is too bad
the base RTF standard is not a little richer.  Perhaps there is a third
party control that supports more.

> Is HTML an option for good quality printed reports.

I don't think I would use HTML for printed reports.  I think pagination
would be tricky.  Getting the reports to look consistent across different
browser installations and configurations could be tricky.  Browsers can be
configured to use different type sizes.

Chris

I never attempted #2, but was successful with #1 in VisualAge
Smalltalk.  Since Dolphin's COM support is superior to VA, I'm sure
you would be able to do it -

jlo

[hidden email] (Edward Stow) wrote in message news:<[hidden email]>...

Edward,

You might want to have a look at FOP at http://xml.apache.org/fop.

You can generate your data into xml and have the report in xsl format. It
has
great features like printing, previewing and is able to generate documents
in
pdf, postscript, rtf and more formats.

Tools are available for creating the xsl files and it has all the report
formatting elements you need (I think).

Only.... it's java. But can be used with the shellExecute: command.

Using html for reporting sucks. And the current rtf/printing tools are
not sufficient in my opinion.

Regards,

Nico

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