Board index » delphi » Rave Report in Delphi 7 and Crystal Report in Delphi 2005

2005-03-11 01:18:45 AM
delphi111
Hi:
Has anyone used Rave Report in Delphi 7? If so, do you like it?
If you like it, can you refer me to any good reference materials
(other than Borland's Delphi Developer's Guide). Rave Report
is yet to get a rave review!
Meanwhile, has anyone written an application that uses the
Crystal Report in Delphi 2005? If so, what is your opinion.
Thanks.
Gbenga A{*word*73}la
"The Alchemist"
 

Gbenga A{*word*73}la writes:
-Craig
--
Craig Stuntz [TeamB] . Vertex Systems Corp. . Columbus, OH
Delphi/InterBase Weblog : blogs.teamb.com/craigstuntz
Want to help make Delphi and InterBase better? Use QC!
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Perhaps, the experience in Delphi 2005 will be different,
since it comes with it. I don't want to use it in Delphi 6/7,
I am interested in how its ease of use in Delphi 2005.
Thanks for your response.
Gbenga A{*word*73}la
"The Alchemist"
"Craig Stuntz [TeamB]" <XXXX@XXXXX.COM [a.k.a. acm.org]>writes:

"Gbenga A{*word*73}la" <XXXX@XXXXX.COM>writes
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Gbenga A{*word*73}la writes:
in Delphi. The problem is the product itself.
As a trivial example, there is *no way,* after 11 versions, to
override the font in an RTF text field. It simply can not be done. And it
took them something like 8 or 9 versions before it could even show RTF
without displaying the markups literally.
Add to that painfully bad developer documentation (You thought the
D2005 docs were lacking? You ain't seen nothin' yet!) and a royalty you
must pay if you want to create reports on the fly at runtime, and other
solutions start to look much better.
That said, Crystal's biggest point in its favor is that a lot of
people know it and want to stick with something they know. But as
someone once said about COM, "It's like smoking: If you've never used
it, don't start."
D2005 doesn't even have imported ActiveX controls by default for Win32
apps. For Win32 apps it is no more difficult than it is in D6/7, but I'm
really not sure why it isn't easier.
-Craig
--
Craig Stuntz [TeamB] . Vertex Systems Corp. . Columbus, OH
Delphi/InterBase Weblog : blogs.teamb.com/craigstuntz
How to ask questions the smart way:
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Craig Stuntz [TeamB] writes:
Mark J. Wallin (former CR victim).
 

because Borland bundles it with Delphi doesn't mean it is the best solution,
or in some (usually rare) cases, even a good solution.
David R.
 

We use both on a daily basis.
Now, we are REALLY trying to stop using Crystal (DLL pain, slow and for the
web, its basically a no no).
Cheers,
"Gbenga A{*word*73}la" <XXXX@XXXXX.COM>writes

there are several tutorial type articles on the add-ons page from Nevrona:
www.nevrona.com/rave/addons.shtml . Look for:
"First Steps for Rave with Delphi" article
"Introduction to Rave I through IV" article
"Rave Overview Presentation" from ADUG symposium
"Next Steps for Rave - Rave goes .NET" article
:-) thomas
btw: I work with Rave a lot of years, and believe me: Rave have a high
learning-curve but when it makes "Click" you'll
love the power of Rave, too
"Gbenga A{*word*73}la" <XXXX@XXXXX.COM>schrieb im Newsbeitrag

Back then, Delphi support was just starting but it worked swell.
I continued to like it because you can easily save the reports to files.
This way, you could update your reports without recompiling your
application.
Rave, IMO, is a pain in the ass... I wrote several reports with it,
bought a license for ReportBuilder and re-wrote all my reports.
--
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Martijn Tonies
Database Workbench - developer tool for InterBase, Firebird, MySQL & MS SQL
Server
Upscene Productions
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Gbenga A{*word*73}la writes:
support, both in terms of documentation and response to issues, is very
poor.
Their marketing is even worse - it seems that their treatment of users
of the BE version included in Delphi 7 and D2005 is specifically intended to
discourage them from becoming paid BEX customers.
I recently encountered a show-stopper problem with upgrading a Delphi 7 Rave
BE project to D2005, and asked for help on their newsgroups. I didn't
get an answer to my problem, until 8 days later when a BEX user asked
essentially the same thing. I spent those 8 days finding an alternative
reporting tool, which I will buy for the next new project.
It's a pity, because in general I think Rave is a really decent tool,
technically.
--
Eric Schreiber
 

We did skip Rave because of early adoption of ReportBuilder. Yet, I would
think Rave is very good tool and ported between different versions of
Delphi.
Another think you have to consider is industry presence and here Rave will
loose battle to Crystal especially on enterprice level.
As far as functionality Rave is more Delphi friendly, then CR is more system
agnostic. I had successful implementation of CR since CR v6.0 within Delphi
environment without any big problems and successfully deploy to clients
computers.
In Delphi 2005 CR is present only for WinForms natively so it is up to end
programmer to use BusinessObjects/CR VCL components or just import CR
RDC/ActiveXViewer. After this it is just a matter of using it as everybody
else in VB, VC or C#...
Functionality wise, I'd prefer Crystal... as more mature product
--
Best regards, Serge Dosyukov
Dragon Soft
-------------------------------------------------
My blog - serged.blogspot.com/ - Delphi, CrystalReports and not only
BorCon 2005 blog - borcon2005.blogspot.com/ - once again some
thoughts about BorCon 2005
Check Delphi 7 ->Delphi 2005 chart www.dragonsoftru.com
Try our DS Plug-in System, now with Delphi 2005 support
www.dragonsoftru.com
"Gbenga A{*word*73}la" <XXXX@XXXXX.COM>writes

I'm not sure that a good report-writing solution is available.
No one seems to have anything good to say about Crystal Reports.
I've been using QuickReport, bugs and all. It is designed as a set
of full-fledged Delphi components, and so it integrates well into large
applications. When it works, it is fine, but documentation is spotty,
and there seem to be some deep problems in its handling of printer
control. Perusal of the QuickReport source code immediately makes one
suspicious: it is full of adhocities, and it compiles only with
warnings.
I started looking at Rave Reports in part because of the QuickReport bugs, but
mainly because I thought I'd be switching from Delphi 6 to D2005. I
bought the BEX versions of RR for Delphi 6 and D2005, but my exploration was
limited to D6. The RR source code is better-styled than that of
QuickReport, but things go downhill from there.
Rave Reports effectively consists of two different Delphi addons, one
with a code interface and one with a GUI. The code-interface version
is a mildly smoothed presentation of Printer.Canvas. One can do
anything in it -- it is a Turing machine, after all -- but any complex
report will be an opaque, verbose, mass of code.
The GUI version is self-contained, with only narrow and
ill-documented channels of communication among the parent application
and the various bands of the report. For example, the bands of the
report have BeforePrint & AfterPrint events, but the handlers for those
events must be coded in an undocumented language (it seems to resemble
a cross between Python & Visual Basic, but I am guessing from a few
glimpsed examples) that has no direct access to the data of the parent
application.
As an exercise, I tried to convert a small database application that
includes some names and addresses, mostly in the US. The application
occasionally prints envelopes that should include bar codes for US
addresses and special formatting for non-US addresses. A full U.S.
barcode (start code, 9-digit ZIP, 2-digit routing code, check digit,
stop code) is based on the full address (including house number or P.O.
Box), not just the ZIP code. The computed digits of the bar code are
not maintained in my DB, since they are used only seldom, and in any
event they are logically redundant with the address.
It's easy enough to write code to scan a tMemo address and compute
the bar code, for printing in one of the available bar-code fonts. The
natural way to set up a report using this is to call this code from a
BeforePrint event-handler, when it is needed. There is no documented
way of doing this in the GUI-based Rave Reports. There are ways to
solve the problem, but they involve unattractive calculated fields
and/or error-prone (order-dependent) coding in the application/RR
linkage components.
We're stuck.
 

Gbenga A{*word*73}la writes:
website for additional information. They also have their own newsgroups.
--
David Farrell-Garcia
Whidbey Island Software LLC
Posted with XanaNews 1.17.2.7
 

David R. Robinson <XXXX@XXXXX.COM>writes:
(or in the latter days with FastReports) to deliver an entry version
of one of the actual standard reporting tools for delphi developers.
After all, QuickReport was that when Reportsmith was changed. They did well by
including QuickReport in the past, and though today it is not that useful, many
people still prefer it for compatibility with old versions and seing that
the benefits with Rave aren't all that they're supposed to be indeed.
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