Just wanted to let people here know I’m very happy with BKS Shorts v2 for creating Xojo Web Edition reports. It’s working great and the support people (Bob Keeney and Tim Parnell) are more than patient with me when I need help. I now have reports that are previewed in, and dowloaded as PDFs from, a Modal Dialog. And they all silently grab dynamic data parameters fed them at runtime. And, though none of that is the way it is configured out of the box, it’s highly configurable because the code is not encrypted.
Thanks, Ralph! We really appreciate the endorsement!
Same here, Shorts is awesome. Helps us create interactive good looking reports for our app Moneyspire.
I will be ordering soon!
This version 2 is a must have.
I never get ARGen run with Shorts 2 in the same project. Asking for help, I got this reply on 2017-12-04 without signature:
“I do not know what your Xojo experience level is, but if you are having problem debugging you should probably not be using either ARGen of Shorts until you have a better grasp of how to debug.”
They do kind of assume you know more than “citizen level” Xojo. I once asked a question asking if a solution I’d thought of would work to solve my problem. I was afraid deleting some methods might cause problems, though it looked like they weren’t needed and could fix my issues.
The reply to “will this work?” was “It might”.* 
But all their products are really, really good. I’d like their calendars to get more love, but having the source code has allowed me to do a lot of fun, fun things with it. Their code is really well written and straightforward for the most part. I’m happy to admit I’ve learned a ton just from messing with BKeeney products, inspecting how their code works and so on.
*a support guy, not Bob himself - Bob’s always been super helpful.
[quote=379862:@Thomas Maier]I never get ARGen run with Shorts 2 in the same project. Asking for help, I got this reply on 2017-12-04 without signature:
“I do not know what your Xojo experience level is, but if you are having problem debugging you should probably not be using either ARGen of Shorts until you have a better grasp of how to debug.”[/quote]
Now, come on, let’s give the FULL story. You sent an email asking me about using Shorts and ARGen in the same project and you were worried that there were a BKS_Core folder in each project and which one to use. To which I replied use one of them, compile to figure out if methods were missing and add whatever was missing. To which you sent 3 screenshots of errors that clearly said it was an unknown method. And that’s where I said that if you don’t know how to debug yet you shouldn’t use either product until you do.
Since then, you’ve not ONCE tried to contact us. So here we are 5 months later. Willing to help but you have to be willing to put in some work yourself. Many developers want an ‘easy button’ and neither ActiveRecord or Shorts are an easy button. You do have to do some work.
To give a more detailed answer, Shorts does not use ActiveRecord. Period. But Shorts can easily coexist with ActiveRecord and we’ve done so on many desktop and web projects. With the new-ish DataArrayBKS class it’s relatively easy to convert from ActiveRecord to something that Shorts can use. That doesn’t work for dynamic reporting (where the user is asked for query parameters) but it’s AN option. Shorts usually depends on querying the database to get the data but DataArrayBKS is there for those situations where the data isn’t easily obtainable via query.
To fair, I do that too, and not just the support guy. Sometimes I don’t know the answer either and it seemed like a low risk proposition to say ‘try it and put them back in if it doesn’t compile.’
I’ve contacted BKeeney support multiple times over the last couple years and have always received great support and timely responses. Yes, it may take some work on your part to get some things implemented in your project the way you want them to be (you get the source code), but that’s normal.