Report creation at report time possible?

Hi all,

I know I take a shortcut, I have not time to scan the documentation.

Someone is looking for quotes for his project. The description is:

Need an application and / or interface to create and manage reports with specific fields, but with unlimited quantities.

Can be interfaced with a database.

Quite precise as you can see :wink:.

So my question is: is it possible to create a desktop application that lets the user to create and managed his own reports using the report creation included in Xojo ?

Many thanks

It sounds like BKeeney Shorts is what you’re looking for https://bkeeney.com/allproducts/bkeeney-shorts/

Shorts is its own report engine, but it’s more flexible than the Xojo reporting tools.

I know BKeeny Shorts, I find it rough on the edges. So Xojo Report creation can’t be used by a user ? I am trying to find all of the options in order to send an open quote until I get more information, if I can get some.

Not that I’m aware of. User reports was one of the selling points of Shorts, iirc.

There are also solutions from Valentina, but there doesn’t seem to have a way to embed report creation inside a Xojo app.

report creation is very special and not for a default user.
what maybe work if you would use a scripting language for generating a report.
if you have a windows server and a ms sql server maybe “SQL Server Reporting Services” it have a own
reporting tool. you could start it from your xojo app.

Bernado Monsalve had an embeddable Report component a while back. Don’t know if it is still available though.

Have a look at https://lbmsoft.com/dbreport/index.php

The site is still live, last time updated in 2015. I looked and didn’t found anything regarding current versions of Xojo.

Actually, if you download the demo on the website, it says 20200220. So, it may have been updated to run with the Xojo latest releases.

I downloaded the demo and found out two projects in the ZIP:

image

The newest is 2018r4, meaning the newest project is about 2 years old.

1 Like

Community activity is also a huge factor of trust with third party tools. I haven’t ever had the pleasure of chatting with Bernado Monsalve, nor can I find a forum user by that name.

That’s not to say they’re not great with email support, I just haven’t ever come across them personally.

I tried the 
Example 2018r4
 project in both 2020r1 and 2018r4, for unknown reasons the files that are supposed to be copies under Windows->CopyFilesStepWin are not copied, with the result that the application fails. I wonder what’s wrong with files copying ?!?

I also looked at the code, everything is API 1.0. It compiles under 2020r4, I thought it wouldn’t.

To sum up, dbReport hasn’t been revisited since a while, so I don’t thing I can trust it.

BKS Reports and DBReport are API 1 only. Also 2020R1 complies API 1 without any issue.

Ok, and if I am right the contextual menu does not show API objects or methods.

Yes, you are correct, unless the project was created in a version pre 2019R2. In this case, 202R1 will also show the API 1 in the contextual menus.