[DUG] Rave Reports

[Patrick Sheehan]

As a low time - low skill level user I find it great (D2006). Additional dll
files are optional. If I get unexpected results I know to look at my data
source for errors.
Patrick

Patrick Anthony Associates Ltd
PO Box 31-831, Milford
168 Kitchener Rd, Milford
Auckland, New Zealand
Ph: 9 486-5020 Mob: 021 732-107  Fx: 9 486-5020
patrick at compnz.co.nz  www.compnz.co.nz




Jeremy Coulter asked: 

> Does anyone use Rave Reports in their apps. ?
> What have been your experiences. From memory you have to supply a DLL
> or maybe 2 with your app. install?

Yes, we use RAVE, or more correctly RPPro in the Accredo Business
Software suite (nee Profax Accounting), and we have done so for about 10
years.

As shipped it's a totally Delphi sourced based distribution and has
various layers that you can work at for generating reports. Originally
it was a very good code based reporting engine called RPPro, and that is
the level at which we still use it. This provides us with a fairly good
insulation from the actual Windows printing device model and allows for
various outputs to be generated from it. The mains ones that we use are
the printer output, and the PDF output engines.

Over the years Nevrona decided to add a full user report design surface
and renamed the package RAVE, but after looking at RAVE we decided that
we were better off writing our own domain specific report designers and
totally ignoring the RAVE designer. Other may feel differently but it
really depends on the data you are reporting from and the level of user
skill that your product has.

There are one or two remaining gremlins in the RPPro reporting engine
that I have hacked around over the years, the two most annoying were
handling the printer naming mess that occurs in Terminal Server
situations, and the lack of elegant font embedding technology in the PDF
output engine.

Happily there are various third (or is that forth?) party solutions to
the PDF output from RPPRo side of things and you can buy some very
advanced PDF output stuff that will to all the PDF magic you may ever
need.

Overall I recommend RAVE/RPPro as a package, but be warned that Nevrona
have focused heavily on the RAVE side of things over the last 5 years
and have been ignoring any improvements to the RPPro code based layer,
and have made minimal patches to issues in it over the last 4 or 5
releases. Now that they concentrate on RAVE they are letting RPPro
slowly stagnate so long as its supports RAVE that's all they care about,
as its their primary market.

Cheers, Max.

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