Understanding the Reporting Feature

Hi-

I am trying to get a feel for the potential of TDA as a reporting tool, and specifically how it stacks up against a product like Crystal Reports. I know we are not comparing apples to apples here but I’m wondering if in TDA you can do things like create reports with multiple subqueries, limit/alter data via code, create multiple page reports and so on.

I just downloaded the trial this morning and so far it looks like a great tool. I’m just wondering about the extent of its reporting capabilities.

Thanks for any input/insight you can offer!

In regards to the reporting feature.

  1. You cannot currently have several sub queries. This is something we are looking into adding perhaps to the 3.0 release (Perhaps sooner, but probably not to the 2.1 release though).
  2. You can limit data and otherwise customize your report in code using c#, but it is pretty tricky and not very well documented.
  3. I’m not entirely sure what you mean with creating multiple page report. You can create reports that cover more than one page, but that seems to basic to actually be what you really mean. :slight_smile:

It’s been a few years since I used Crystal Reports but one area where we are really good in comparison to Crystal Reports is what you do before you start designing the report. Back when I used CR if you had a report to make that accessed a lot of data and needed to actually write the query to access the data yourself CR didn’t help you at all (You pretty much got a text editor where you could paste in your query). This is where TDA really excels with the query builder, editor code insight and database browser.

/Mauritz

Thanks Mauritz -

I think “multiple page report” was a half-baked way of asking whether TDA contains the ability to use multiple subqueries which would cause the report to span more than one page…which is something you already addressed in your response.

Along those lines, if we wanted to create a robust, multiple-query report via a tool like Crystal, would we be able to do so in conjunction with TDA? For example, could we build/store queries from multiple data sources in TDA and then build a report in Crystal using these queries?

Thanks for your continued help~

In regards to your last question. Yes, in fact that was how I used Crystal when I last used it. I used Toad to write the queries to return exactly what I needed and then once I had it right I just did a copy and paste of that into CR (At the time there was no reporting at all built into the product). As also I said in the future we are probably going to add this feature to Toad, but it just haven’t made the schedule yet.

/Mauritz

If your data source is Oracle, then you can look at our Toad for Oracle product. It’s reporting system supports this architecture.