ActiveReports 6 and the GrapeCity Factor - A look back and what to expect in future

With the soon to be launched ActiveReports 6, this seems an appropriate time to take a step back and look at what the GrapeCity acquisition has meant for Data Dynamics and what it implies for the future.

The ActiveReports 6 launch marks a major milestone in two respects. Firstly, it is a reflection of the commitment to not only continue the product development and support but in fact, take ActiveReports, Data Dynamics Reports and Data Dynamics Analysis to the next level in terms of their strategic direction and overall product features, quality and support.

Read the full article on the ActiveReports Blog.

About GrapeCity and ActiveReports

When GrapeCity acquired Data Dynamics late last year and the GrapeCity name started appearing in all Data Dynamics promotions, it was a relatively unknown name for a number of customers who probably wondered who GrapeCity was.

As it turns out, GrapeCity's name is very familiar to a number of US and international Component and Developer Tool vendors.

Read the full article.

Microsoft Case Study on ActiveReports

Microsoft today released a new Case study highlighting Precision.BI's use of ActiveReports and other .NET reporting and Analysis tools from GrapeCity-Data Dynamics to speed the delivery of a new Healthcare Business Intelligence product to its customers.

Precision.BI needed powerful analysis and reporting components for its healthcare business intelligence solution. The company found what it needed in third-party components from GrapeCity, including functionality that enables users to explore huge quantities of data and to generate rich reports on an ad hoc basis. Precision.BI plans to continue taking advantage of GrapeCity’s rich components and excellent support as both companies migrate their software to Microsoft® Silverlight™ 3.
Read the full Case Study (PDF).

ActiveReports rapid XML processing options

Chillisoft describe in their latest blog on how they leverage the flexible code model of ActiveReports to roll an optimized XML+XSLT solution.

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ActiveReports provides the XMLDataSource option for sourcing your data from xml. My knowledge of all its ins and outs is not substantial, but I ran into two significant problems in a recent project which led me towards an alternative, innovative approach.

The first problem is that an xml document does not guarantee a structure like a database does. Xml’s flexibility in the layout of elements is beautiful on one hand but hard to fit into a report that expects a fixed structure.

The second problem in my case was the use of sub-reports to cover for different structures in the xml document. I won’t get fully into the detail, but where an element holds recurring sub-items, you can use sub-reports to list all the items. The trouble is that a significant number of sub-reports kill your report generation performance. I had a particular problem where my first report would take 15 seconds to generate on the server, and then degrade by another 5 seconds every time I ran it again. This is of course totally unacceptable for a frequently used report.

Here then was my innovation … combine ActiveReports and XSLT. ActiveReports provides the RichTextBox, which has an Html property to which you can assign the Html you generate from your XSLT.

Read the full blog posting.