The way we're all taught to profile is you install a profiler like dotTrace and then run your code under it. It shows you the hotspots and you dive in to that code to figure out how to optimize it. This is a great approach for many cases. I've used it myself a lot, especially back when I did game programming.
However, there are a lot of times where a much easier approach is equally effective. And for some cases, much more effective. It's fast, it's simple, and it gets the job done. What is it?
For a great many situations you will find that of the 10 times you broke into the program, it is in the same code each time. You now know where the code is spending its time. And you did this without installing a profiler, without running it, without having to dive into its results.
This approach is not a panacea. First off, a profiler will give you the actual lines of code that are taking the time, and how much on each line. This quick approach works great when it is a single line of code. The more spread out the issue is, the less helpful it is. Even if the time is all in one method, it can be certain parts of a loop for example that are sucking up the time – but it is various parts each taking significant time. There are many other cases where this is not the best approach.
But there are also some great advantages to this approach. With our reporting/docgen program a lot of the time the big hit is a single select in the report template. A profiler will show that it is the selects that are taking the time. But breaking into the debugger makes it easy to see what select on each break. If it is consistently the same 1 or 2 selects, then you know that what needs to be optimized is not executing a select, but a specific select. (Or a column in the database needs to be indexed.)
Another case we have seen at times is the hit is importing images or sub-reports from a specific server. Again, if on each break it is waiting for a file to be read from a website, and the break always shows that it is when hitting a specific website, then the problem clearly is not reading a file, but the response time of a specific server.
With very rare exceptions I always use the debugger break approach first. When that is sufficient (about 60% of the time), then I am working on the performance issue a minute or two after starting.
And for the other 40% of the time, I have dotTrace (.NET) and YourKit (Java) installed and I fire them up and dive into the result tree from them.
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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.
