"Basically, we wanted a system where each section of each report was like a Lego piece, and users could snap them together in any combination and order they wanted and still get a professional-looking report that was consistent throughout.... ActiveReports was the only component out there that had the capabilities and flexibility they needed. Why should they be out there trying to chisel a wheel out of stone, when Data Dynamics already offered a perfectly good wheel?"
Mark Donohoe, President, IntuiSoft
Background
Porter Valley Software, located in Porter Ranch, CA, designs reporting software for the inspection industry, including residential and commercial inspectors. Their product, InspectVue, had been using a reporting engine created in Visual Basic 6, which ran on text files rather than a database system. Over the years, their customers had identified several problems with that reporting engine:
- It took too long to generate a report — so long that users would typically initiate a report and then go get a cup of coffee while it ran.
- Because reports were generated on the fly, the software couldn't compile the table of contents till it completed the report — so the table of contents printed out last, and users would have to manually insert it at the front of the document.
- It was difficult to customize and configure reports to meet specific user requirements.
- Inspectors typically want to include other documents in their reports, such as .PDF files from the libraries they refer to in the course of an inspection. The existing reporting engine required them to upload the documents separately and integrate them manually. What they wanted was a way to automatically integrate these third-party documents into their InspectVue reports.
In 2005, the company decided it to enhance its reporting engine to address these concerns. Their initial plan was to move to Crystal Reports, and they brought in Mark Donohoe, President of IntuiSoft, Inc., to create the new reporting engine.