I've found that a lot of people have a better understanding of our system when I explain how the engine processes a report. (Others are very content with "it works.")
First off, the engine does not use Microsoft Office. You design in Office but the server itself does not use Office. And when in AutoTag you generate a report, that generate process uses the .net reporting engine and does not make use of Office, it is merely a self-contained app being run from AutoTag. So you do not install Office on your server (calling Office to generate reports would be a very slow system and would only run on Windows – that's why we don't do it).
The Java engine is pure Java and so will run on any system that has the Java virtual machine. We have customers using us on various flavors of Linux, AIX, Mac, and virtually every IBM mainframe. The .NET engine is pure .NET – 100% managed code. It does not use Java and does not require a Java virtual machine.
We do this with a single code base so that both engines are the same program and we only have to write code once. How do we do this? For the .NET version we use the Microsoft J# compiler which compiles Java source code into .NET CLR (which is the same thing the C# compiler does). About 2% of the code is specific to each platform and the rest is the same code, compiled twice, by the javac and devenv compilers. The 2% that is different is a set of classes where the public class definition is identical for both platforms, but the code in each method is unique to that platform. We use this to wrap the calls for XML manipulation, bitmap generation, etc.
There are three substantial differences between the Java and .NET reporting engines. And keep in mind that AutoTag uses the .NET engine to show you a sample report even if your server uses the Java engine.
Ok, now we know how it is built and installed. Next is how the code generates a report. This is pretty straightforward:
So there you have it. The concept is simple, but the effort under the covers is significant. I look back at how little we handled in version 1.0 vs. what we do now and I'm amazed at the breadth of properties that must be taken into account and the literally thousands of special cases, rules, etc. we have learned about and added to our code.
But the core API of the server has never changed, and I take a lot of pride that we've kept it simple through 10 versions. And we've kept installing it on a server equally simple – just copy the files onto the server and call them from your application.
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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.
