OI9.3 Banded Report Writer
I am sorry for being more than a little quiet on the blog recently. Whilst it could be perceived that things are quiet at Revelation, that is far from the truth. I have spoken with many of you, but for those readers that I have not yet caught up with, the reason for this quiet period is due to the passing of two close family members and I am heavily engaged in arrangements and the legalities that come with such events.
Anyway, I wanted to let you know about a new feature that is well underway for the forthcoming OpenInsight 9.3 release. Whilst we are still some way from the beta phase, Mike took a few minutes out of his schedule to run through the new Banded Report Writer (BRW) that will ship with the new version.
With an Office 2007 look and feel, drag and drop, support for images, intuitive report design pad and property panel, the new BRW is super easy to use and it really looks the part. Along with the properties panel tab, the tool also features two additional tabs to display field information and also thumb nails of report pages.
Putting together a nice looking banded report with headers and footers took Mike just a couple of minutes. Furthermore, whilst it is currently known as the BRW, there are several layout options that also enables it to handle normal column based reports with ease – in my opinion, this tool is set to double as both a Banded Report Writer and a Column Based Report Writer. There are also several output formats to provide developers and users with plenty of flexibility.
I have not yet got my hands on the new BRW, but when I do you can be sure that a video demo will be following pretty quickly.
