[archive] Has anyone used a third party reporting tool with their cobol programs?

[Migrated content. Thread originally posted on 14 December 2009]

Hello,

I am researching ways to make my software's reports looks better. Also, researching the ability to allow the user to have more power to select how they want their reports to look. They have to be able to add images, have to ability to select portrait or landscape, change the font, etc.

So, I was wondering if anyone was using a third party reporting tool to print reports. If yes, what tool are you using? How hard was it to implement?

My software uses sql statements to pull data from an ODBC database. SQL Statements are embedded within the Cobol code.

Any thoughts or suggestions or help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks.

Hi,

We are trying to incorporate Crystal Reports 2008 into our AcuCOBOL environement..

Progress is slow because in version 2008 CR has dropped all support for it's ActiveX interface which most of the samples found here use.

We are currently searching for a way to implement this via .NET but so far progress is slow. I even contacted Microfocus for help but it does not seem they have the resources available to help me.

So that's where I am at.. If all else fails. I will have to implement a 2 step solution. 1) Have the user run the AcuCOBOL part to build the feedfile to the report. and then 2, run the report manually..

Just my 0.02$, Canadian of course!!

[Migrated content. Thread originally posted on 14 December 2009]

Hello,

I am researching ways to make my software's reports looks better. Also, researching the ability to allow the user to have more power to select how they want their reports to look. They have to be able to add images, have to ability to select portrait or landscape, change the font, etc.

So, I was wondering if anyone was using a third party reporting tool to print reports. If yes, what tool are you using? How hard was it to implement?

My software uses sql statements to pull data from an ODBC database. SQL Statements are embedded within the Cobol code.

Any thoughts or suggestions or help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks.

In the last year I started using RPV Reports and am pretty happy with it. see
http://www.rpvsoftware.com/
It's low cost and free to distribute.
It has a GUI report designer and what I like is that it outputs these as plain text (.RPV) templates so one always has control.
Bear in mind it originates from a Spanish country so some of the English Help text is interesting but fine.
I kept my plain text reports and extended the report program to ask the user which Report Format they want i.e. T-Text, G=Graphical and X=XML.
Graphical will output a plain text (RPX) file which is understood by the RPV Viewer which matches it to the Design Template (RPV) file. Before the report closes it invokes the RPV Viewer which displays the report to the screen with various controls and options of which print to any Windows printer is one. The can also print to PDF and email as PDF.
It also has an optional RPV Poll program whichs polls a certain directory and prints whatever goes in there automatically.
I went a step further with my Advice printing which are like generated letters with about 12 formats and used my pre-existing templates as templates to produce the RPX file. Sounds confusing but it works fine and it meant I kept my existing reports intact with some extra coding for RPV.
The XML output was easy to add-on which for now is future proofing until a good XML Report Generator comes along.

[Migrated content. Thread originally posted on 14 December 2009]

Hello,

I am researching ways to make my software's reports looks better. Also, researching the ability to allow the user to have more power to select how they want their reports to look. They have to be able to add images, have to ability to select portrait or landscape, change the font, etc.

So, I was wondering if anyone was using a third party reporting tool to print reports. If yes, what tool are you using? How hard was it to implement?

My software uses sql statements to pull data from an ODBC database. SQL Statements are embedded within the Cobol code.

Any thoughts or suggestions or help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks.

In the last year I started using RPV Reports and am pretty happy with it. see
http://www.rpvsoftware.com/
It's low cost and free to distribute.
It has a GUI report designer and what I like is that it outputs these as plain text (.RPV) templates so one always has control.
Bear in mind it originates from a Spanish country so some of the English Help text is interesting but fine.
I kept my plain text reports and extended the report program to ask the user which Report Format they want i.e. T-Text, G=Graphical and X=XML.
Graphical will output a plain text (RPX) file which is understood by the RPV Viewer which matches it to the Design Template (RPV) file. Before the report closes it invokes the RPV Viewer which displays the report to the screen with various controls and options of which print to any Windows printer is one. The can also print to PDF and email as PDF.
It also has an optional RPV Poll program whichs polls a certain directory and prints whatever goes in there automatically.
I went a step further with my Advice printing which are like generated letters with about 12 formats and used my pre-existing templates as templates to produce the RPX file. Sounds confusing but it works fine and it meant I kept my existing reports intact with some extra coding for RPV.
The XML output was easy to add-on which for now is future proofing until a good XML Report Generator comes along.

[Migrated content. Thread originally posted on 14 December 2009]

Hello,

I am researching ways to make my software's reports looks better. Also, researching the ability to allow the user to have more power to select how they want their reports to look. They have to be able to add images, have to ability to select portrait or landscape, change the font, etc.

So, I was wondering if anyone was using a third party reporting tool to print reports. If yes, what tool are you using? How hard was it to implement?

My software uses sql statements to pull data from an ODBC database. SQL Statements are embedded within the Cobol code.

Any thoughts or suggestions or help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks.

In the last year I started using RPV Reports and am pretty happy with it. see
http://www.rpvsoftware.com/
It's low cost and free to distribute.
It has a GUI report designer and what I like is that it outputs these as plain text (.RPV) templates so one always has control.
Bear in mind it originates from a Spanish country so some of the English Help text is interesting but fine.
I kept my plain text reports and extended the report program to ask the user which Report Format they want i.e. T-Text, G=Graphical and X=XML.
Graphical will output a plain text (RPX) file which is understood by the RPV Viewer which matches it to the Design Template (RPV) file. Before the report closes it invokes the RPV Viewer which displays the report to the screen with various controls and options of which print to any Windows printer is one. The can also print to PDF and email as PDF.
It also has an optional RPV Poll program whichs polls a certain directory and prints whatever goes in there automatically.
I went a step further with my Advice printing which are like generated letters with about 12 formats and used my pre-existing templates as templates to produce the RPX file. Sounds confusing but it works fine and it meant I kept my existing reports intact with some extra coding for RPV.
The XML output was easy to add-on which for now is future proofing until a good XML Report Generator comes along.

[Migrated content. Thread originally posted on 14 December 2009]

Hello,

I am researching ways to make my software's reports looks better. Also, researching the ability to allow the user to have more power to select how they want their reports to look. They have to be able to add images, have to ability to select portrait or landscape, change the font, etc.

So, I was wondering if anyone was using a third party reporting tool to print reports. If yes, what tool are you using? How hard was it to implement?

My software uses sql statements to pull data from an ODBC database. SQL Statements are embedded within the Cobol code.

Any thoughts or suggestions or help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks.

I thought I would try loading some samples to my web site so I hope these links work for you. You can see actual PDF's produced by the RPV Report tool using test data from my AcuCobol program.
The multi-page Transaction Statement shows how you can generate images and make it a complete graphical look.
http://www.aceway.net/rpv-samples/Transaction Statement Multi.pdf

The Periodic Payment report is a standard business report.
http://www.aceway.net/rpv-samples/Periodic Payment Audit of Chang.pdf

The Renegotiation Advice is a letter that is meant to print on letterhead stationary. This saves generating graphical headers.
http://www.aceway.net/rpv-samples/Renegotiation Advice.pdf

As I said in the previous thread, these report programs can still output the original text-only reports so no new reports were written, just modified. The new logic was put in common copybook routines where possible. Plus there is some generic program sections that are custom changed for each report but the same notion is re-applied in all reports. So to apply RPV in another program I just focus on a subset of custom code. The structure stays the same.

In fact, I even keep my original report heading, detail and total lines in working storage and just added a special character between fields which I use for controlling output and strip out before printing. So if the report changes, I edit in one place and the Text, Graphical and XML outputs all change automatically. It is a simple idea that keeps maintenance to a minimum.

[Migrated content. Thread originally posted on 14 December 2009]

Hello,

I am researching ways to make my software's reports looks better. Also, researching the ability to allow the user to have more power to select how they want their reports to look. They have to be able to add images, have to ability to select portrait or landscape, change the font, etc.

So, I was wondering if anyone was using a third party reporting tool to print reports. If yes, what tool are you using? How hard was it to implement?

My software uses sql statements to pull data from an ODBC database. SQL Statements are embedded within the Cobol code.

Any thoughts or suggestions or help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks.

Crystal reports with ACUxdbc is easy to use and it is fantastic

[Migrated content. Thread originally posted on 14 December 2009]

Hello,

I am researching ways to make my software's reports looks better. Also, researching the ability to allow the user to have more power to select how they want their reports to look. They have to be able to add images, have to ability to select portrait or landscape, change the font, etc.

So, I was wondering if anyone was using a third party reporting tool to print reports. If yes, what tool are you using? How hard was it to implement?

My software uses sql statements to pull data from an ODBC database. SQL Statements are embedded within the Cobol code.

Any thoughts or suggestions or help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks.

Really - works OK with XDBC?

What about simple date formatting - as Crystal with ODBC hadn't got a clue how to cope with a date in the format CCYYMMDD

We gave up trying to integrate Crystal with our ERP product.

[Migrated content. Thread originally posted on 14 December 2009]

Hello,

I am researching ways to make my software's reports looks better. Also, researching the ability to allow the user to have more power to select how they want their reports to look. They have to be able to add images, have to ability to select portrait or landscape, change the font, etc.

So, I was wondering if anyone was using a third party reporting tool to print reports. If yes, what tool are you using? How hard was it to implement?

My software uses sql statements to pull data from an ODBC database. SQL Statements are embedded within the Cobol code.

Any thoughts or suggestions or help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks.

Really - works OK with XDBC?

What about simple date formatting - as Crystal with ODBC hadn't got a clue how to cope with a date in the format CCYYMMDD

We gave up trying to integrate Crystal with our ERP product.

[Migrated content. Thread originally posted on 14 December 2009]

Hello,

I am researching ways to make my software's reports looks better. Also, researching the ability to allow the user to have more power to select how they want their reports to look. They have to be able to add images, have to ability to select portrait or landscape, change the font, etc.

So, I was wondering if anyone was using a third party reporting tool to print reports. If yes, what tool are you using? How hard was it to implement?

My software uses sql statements to pull data from an ODBC database. SQL Statements are embedded within the Cobol code.

Any thoughts or suggestions or help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks.

Really - works OK with XDBC?

What about simple date formatting - as Crystal with ODBC hadn't got a clue how to cope with a date in the format CCYYMMDD

We gave up trying to integrate Crystal with our ERP product.

[Migrated content. Thread originally posted on 14 December 2009]

Hello,

I am researching ways to make my software's reports looks better. Also, researching the ability to allow the user to have more power to select how they want their reports to look. They have to be able to add images, have to ability to select portrait or landscape, change the font, etc.

So, I was wondering if anyone was using a third party reporting tool to print reports. If yes, what tool are you using? How hard was it to implement?

My software uses sql statements to pull data from an ODBC database. SQL Statements are embedded within the Cobol code.

Any thoughts or suggestions or help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks.

We used RPV years ago, but haven't used their more advanced features of recent years. We were very pleased with RPV and received excellent support from them.

We abandoned trying to integrate to Crystal Reports several times because they didn't give us an option to programmatically adjust their data dictionary (where you could define relationships between files). For us this was a big deal. To my knowledge, though, we have customers who use it with ODBC. They just have to be smart enough to know how to "link" the files.

[Migrated content. Thread originally posted on 14 December 2009]

Hello,

I am researching ways to make my software's reports looks better. Also, researching the ability to allow the user to have more power to select how they want their reports to look. They have to be able to add images, have to ability to select portrait or landscape, change the font, etc.

So, I was wondering if anyone was using a third party reporting tool to print reports. If yes, what tool are you using? How hard was it to implement?

My software uses sql statements to pull data from an ODBC database. SQL Statements are embedded within the Cobol code.

Any thoughts or suggestions or help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks.

Really works with XDBC or CSV please try with datalink viewer or visual cut
http://www.milletsoftware.com/DataLink_Viewer.htm

[Migrated content. Thread originally posted on 14 December 2009]

Hello,

I am researching ways to make my software's reports looks better. Also, researching the ability to allow the user to have more power to select how they want their reports to look. They have to be able to add images, have to ability to select portrait or landscape, change the font, etc.

So, I was wondering if anyone was using a third party reporting tool to print reports. If yes, what tool are you using? How hard was it to implement?

My software uses sql statements to pull data from an ODBC database. SQL Statements are embedded within the Cobol code.

Any thoughts or suggestions or help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks.

Hi, sorry for late response.
I experienced a couple of report tools:
1) ComponentOne Report, included in a very good suite of products (Studio Enterprise)that delivers 2 versions: the .Net one (with barcoding included) and ActiveX (older and a bit limited by it's age). Well it's an activeX so if you're developing in a thin client environment you've got to distribute anc install component onto clients. One more: it has an own data engine so if you use vision files you've got to deserve odbc/xdbc connection to client... not very friendly anc cost increasing. Once more, if you wanna provide customer with report designer you must buy an appropriate (and costly...) version.
2) Combit List and Label: it has activex, dll and .Net version, iut has barcoding in all versions, it's data indipendent! Your progam must work in 2 way possible ways:
a. you can feed all data defined in report in a a feeding loop and then ask component to generate document
b. you can answer to a component drive event that ask your program to feed structured data. One more: designer can be distribuited 'cos and it's not standalone but integrated with report generated components and ca be easily embedded in your app. Even more, there are localized language packs UI interface.

I think solution 2 is best for an iterop env like Acu.
Let me know your opinion.
Bye Gio

[Migrated content. Thread originally posted on 14 December 2009]

Hello,

I am researching ways to make my software's reports looks better. Also, researching the ability to allow the user to have more power to select how they want their reports to look. They have to be able to add images, have to ability to select portrait or landscape, change the font, etc.

So, I was wondering if anyone was using a third party reporting tool to print reports. If yes, what tool are you using? How hard was it to implement?

My software uses sql statements to pull data from an ODBC database. SQL Statements are embedded within the Cobol code.

Any thoughts or suggestions or help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks.

Hi, sorry for late response.
I experienced a couple of report tools:
1) ComponentOne Report, included in a very good suite of products (Studio Enterprise)that delivers 2 versions: the .Net one (with barcoding included) and ActiveX (older and a bit limited by it's age). Well it's an activeX so if you're developing in a thin client environment you've got to distribute anc install component onto clients. One more: it has an own data engine so if you use vision files you've got to deserve odbc/xdbc connection to client... not very friendly anc cost increasing. Once more, if you wanna provide customer with report designer you must buy an appropriate (and costly...) version.
2) Combit List and Label: it has activex, dll and .Net version, iut has barcoding in all versions, it's data indipendent! Your progam must work in 2 way possible ways:
a. you can feed all data defined in report in a a feeding loop and then ask component to generate document
b. you can answer to a component drive event that ask your program to feed structured data. One more: designer can be distribuited 'cos and it's not standalone but integrated with report generated components and ca be easily embedded in your app. Even more, there are localized language packs UI interface.

I think solution 2 is best for an iterop env like Acu.
Let me know your opinion.
Bye Gio

[Migrated content. Thread originally posted on 14 December 2009]

Hello,

I am researching ways to make my software's reports looks better. Also, researching the ability to allow the user to have more power to select how they want their reports to look. They have to be able to add images, have to ability to select portrait or landscape, change the font, etc.

So, I was wondering if anyone was using a third party reporting tool to print reports. If yes, what tool are you using? How hard was it to implement?

My software uses sql statements to pull data from an ODBC database. SQL Statements are embedded within the Cobol code.

Any thoughts or suggestions or help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks.

Hi, sorry for late response.
I experienced a couple of report tools:
1) ComponentOne Report, included in a very good suite of products (Studio Enterprise)that delivers 2 versions: the .Net one (with barcoding included) and ActiveX (older and a bit limited by it's age). Well it's an activeX so if you're developing in a thin client environment you've got to distribute anc install component onto clients. One more: it has an own data engine so if you use vision files you've got to deserve odbc/xdbc connection to client... not very friendly anc cost increasing. Once more, if you wanna provide customer with report designer you must buy an appropriate (and costly...) version.
2) Combit List and Label: it has activex, dll and .Net version, iut has barcoding in all versions, it's data indipendent! Your progam must work in 2 way possible ways:
a. you can feed all data defined in report in a a feeding loop and then ask component to generate document
b. you can answer to a component drive event that ask your program to feed structured data. One more: designer can be distribuited 'cos and it's not standalone but integrated with report generated components and ca be easily embedded in your app. Even more, there are localized language packs UI interface.

I think solution 2 is best for an iterop env like Acu.
Let me know your opinion.
Bye Gio