There are a large number of articles about how Pie Charts are Evil. Now evil is overstating it and there are times pie charts are appropriate. But the vast majority of the time when pie charts are used – they shouldn't be. (I think this is mostly due to people assuming pie charts are the standard way to display percentages.)
The same holds true for banded reports. There are cases where their use is appropriate, but that is a very limited sub-set of where they are used.
So what are banded reports? This is the approach used by Crystal Reports, SSRS, Pentaho, Jasper Reports, Actuate, etc. A report by definition is composed of a report header, a table, and a footer. The table component can have multiple levels of detail, with aggregation at those levels (this is where the term banded comes in).
When this fits the report you want, a banded report is a great solution. If the data comes from a single stored procedure, all you want to display is the data in the single table, and the detail levels and aggregation desired are easily set in the report designer – a banded report designer works well.
But when your needs are different, or more, then this locked in approach becomes a significant problem. Fundamentally banded reports are about limitations. Limitations that can be broached only with great effort and significant compromises.
So when should you look at an alternative approach?
The beauty of free-form (as opposed to banded) report design is you can do anything you want. You select the data you need within the report, you iterate over any data, in any way, across any part of the template. You insert sub-reports as desired and they become part of the template populated with the data you are iterating over. You include charts, gauges, bitmaps, hyperlinks, etc. wherever under any criteria you wish.
With free-form a detail sub-set can be any set of data you wish (even from another database) broken out over any part of the template you wish (not just rows). There is no such thing as a report header, table, and footer, there is just the template where you can place anything anywhere. With free-form, you can structure your report any way you can imagine.
For the cases where the strict structure of a banded report designer is difficult and/or limiting, please take a look at Windward Reports. With Windward you design your reports in Microsoft Word, Excel, or PowerPoint. It provides you a totally freeform report designer, both for layout and formatting. Wicked fast, extremely easy, and very powerful.
So next time you want to tear your hair out over the limitations or difficulity in your banded report designer, take a look at a freeform alternative. It will turn something difficult/impossible into something very easy.
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Adds various capabilities such as inequalities,descending sort, joins, and other functions.
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SQL Select Debugger
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Added a Query tab as a field for typing or pasting in a select statement
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All tags using that Data source will be automatically updated with that name.
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New single interface to replace 2 separate dialog boxes
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Displays of all the tags in the template, structured as they are placed in the template. This provides a simple & intuitive way to see the structure of your template. Also provides the capability to go to any tag and/or see the properties of any tag.
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The ability to integrate the Windward Engine into Google’s cloud computing platform for developing and hosting web applications dubbed Google Applications Engine (GAE).
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This new integration will allow for processing of complex scripts and bi-directional text such as Arabic. Your PDF output will be much tighter and more closely match your template, and we’ll be able to respond rapidly to PDF requests and fixes.
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Includes support for new ForEach and slide break handling, table header row repeat across slide breaks, and native Microsoft support for charts and images.
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Tags are color coded in the template by type, making it easy to visually identify them.
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Version 13’s core code has been reworked and optimized to offer a reduced memory footprint, faster PDF generation and full documentation of supported features and limitations in the specifications for DOCX, XLSX and PPTX.
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Documents can include advanced Word image properties such as shadows, borders, and styles.
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Windward has updated HTML output to reflect changing HTML standards.
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Windward now works with a slew of new datasources: MongoDB, JSON, Cassandra, OData, Salesforce.com
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The Generate Code tool in the designer allows you to open an existing template and, with a click of a button, automatically create a window with the code needed to run your current template with all data sources and variables. Simply copy this code and paste into your application's code in the appropriate place. You now have Windward integrated into your application.
You only need to do this once. You do not do this for each template. Instead, where it has explicit files for the template and output, change that to parameters you pass to this code. Same for the parameters passed to Windward. This example uses explicit values to show you what to substitute in where.
Any pivot tables in an XLSX template are carried over to the XLSX output. The ranges in the pivot ranges are adjusted to match the generated output. So your final XLSX will have pivot tables set as expected in the generated file.
This makes creating an XLSX workbook with pivot tables trivial.
In an imported sub-template, if its properties for a style (ex. Normal) differ from the parent template's properties for the style, the use in the sub-template can be set to either use the properties in the sub-template, or the properties in the parent.
You set to retain when you don't want the child template's styling to change when imported. You set to use the parent when you want the styling of the imported template to match the styling in the parent.
Any explicit styling is always retained. This only impacts styling set by styles.
Tags can be placed in text boxes. Including linked text boxes. This gives you the ability to set the text in a textbox from your data.
Tags can be placed in shapes & smart art. This gives you the ability to set the text in a shape from your data.
When generating HTML output, the engine can either write bitmaps as distinct files the generate HTML references, or it can embed the images in the HTML providing a single file for the output.
You can place tags in pretty much any part of a template, including in footnotes & endnotes.
Any parts of a DOCX or XLSX (PowerPoint does not support this) file that are locked in the template, will be locked the same in the output.
If a font used in the template does not exist on the server generating a report, the font to substitute can be specified.
In addition, if a glyph to be rendered does not exist in the font specified, you can specify the replacement font. This can be set distinctly for European, Bi-Directional, and Far East fonts.
If you need this - it's essential. And if you don't need it, it's irrelevant.
Windward enables you to build a document by applying multiple datasources to the template simultaneously. When Windward is merging the data into a template, it processes the template by handling each tag in order, and each tag pulls from different datasources. (As opposed to processing all of one datasource, then processing the next.)
This allows the select tag to use data from another datasource in its select. For example, if you are pulling customer information from one data source, you can then pull data from the sales datasource using the customer ID of the customer presently processing to pull the sales information for that customer. If you're interested in patching together your data from multiple datasources, read this post on our blog.
