Anyone evaluate WinWard Report generator

BLOMASKY

The price is very high (gulp), but the methodology makes me think that building reports in WW will be as fast as designing applications in Aware.

Anyone play with it?

Bruce

itdeptcorp

Hi,

Yes a while back we had an internal project looking at that coupled with InfoPath/MSSQL with WinWard as an alternative for another report generator.

Was very powerful with the AutoTag features and tied in with MSFT product line and well worth the price back then around $6-7k.. The learning curve was much lower than other Report Writers then in terms of data access and dragging and dropping tags onto a Word Doc. (Autotag feature)

We never tested the Java version

BLOMASKY

curious why you didn't go with it? Do you remember any negatives (besides the price. which I was told is now over 20K which might make it too expensive). However, it "Looks" like I can design, test and put a report into production in a fraction of the time of Jasper, Crystal, SQL reporting service, etc. etc. Especially if its not just a simple tablular report.
Stuff like Purchase Orders, Customer Statements, etc. should save me many hours of design and testing.

Bruce

BenHayat

Personally, if I were to use third party reporting system, I'd use Telerik powerful reporting. I used it with Silverlight, WPF and ASP and it was very nice.

The only problem that I see using it with Aware produced DB Tables, is that Aware doesn't create FK indexes to data relationships, it has ir's own built in proprietary data relation system. So, third party tools like diagramming or reporting, see these tables as flat tables, unless you manually create these FK indexes in some other tools first. But then every time you make a DB change in Aware, you loose your FK indexes and have to re-do them in production. Telerik offers a full report server and many ways to show it on the client side.

http://www.telerik.com/products/reporting.aspx

BLOMASKY

Ben, you are right, if you want to use a WIZARD to write your SQL for you. but if you are even a little proficient (and if I end up teaching the SQL class REMOTELY that Mark wants me to @ the Bali conf.) then you will find writing SQL is pretty darn easy. (Esp. for a Priest / Rabbi or whatever the heck you are today?

There is NO need for foreign keys when joining tables. If you are using MSSQL, which I am, then the db is smart enough to create indexes once you have attempted to access relationships in Aware (if the tables are large enough) so there will be no speed penalty in joining the tables

bruce

BenHayat

BLOMASKY wrote
Ben, you are right, if you want to use a WIZARD to write your SQL for you. but if you are even a little proficient (and if I end up teaching the SQL class REMOTELY that Mark wants me to @ the Bali conf.) then you will find writing SQL is pretty darn easy. (Esp. for a Priest / Rabbi or whatever the heck you are today?

There is NO need for foreign keys when joining tables. If you are using MSSQL, which I am, then the db is smart enough to create indexes once you have attempted to access relationships in Aware (if the tables are large enough) so there will be no speed penalty in joining the tables

bruce

I actually used SQL for 10 years (1995 - 2005) while doing Delphi programming, but I hated it because writing a mix of Pascal and SQL wasn't my choice.

Once I went to .Net and MSFT introduced LINQ (Language INtegrated Query) an Object Oriented query language in C# that allowed to query objects or DB all in C# with full syntax checking while coding, I never went back to SQL coding.

Now that I use Aware's powerful query system, it's one more reason NOT to touch SQL anymore.
I tried to use a diagram system for MySQL and MySQL did not create any FK or relationships on it's own, so every table was flat from outside point of view.

itdeptcorp

The division of the company I worked for did license it back then in 2011.

Here was the core reason(s)

1) We needed to remove a layer of "communication"

A C-level or SVP needed a report -> they contacted IT -> IT-Dept booked the Business Analyst (a guy who could speak more eloquently about the business but knew some of the components like DB to solve the report) -> Analyst met the C-Level or SVP, mocked up a report on paper -> sent this specification to a Report Writer etc... sometimes a DBA got involved or even worse.. and the cycle continued..

WindWard allowed us cut the involvement down to 1 or 2 people max. Analyst build the report in a workshop in front of the C-level's eyes thus getting it done almost in real-time. That 6-7$ at that time was nothing in the salary costs and angry C-levels.

2) Point 2 - Our reports at the time were primarily "Word Documents" with content and this worked better than anything else to make a Quick .dot (Word template with Winward plugins)

Now in 2016 I think it would be a different RFP/Assessment and someone else may win

Now my 2 cents here with AIM and Word/PDF -

Its 2016 over a decade from the day the source was written for Jasper; included here we started fiddling in 2008 and now re-started a project with it in 2016 (with help from Kingsley and Mark B) we have been able to do alot with the report writer included. Yes it has its moments but strangely is extremely nice.

About replacement:

Yes, we also are looking for a replacement with a Drag and Drop "no code" type functionality and would internally code the integration between AIM and that product in a moments notice once we see it matches the current Report generator.