Porter Valley Software Creates a Ground-Breaking Reporting Engine with Data Dynamics ActiveReports
Porter Valley Software needed a powerful, flexible, customizable reporting engine for its InspectVue product — one that could rapidly process programmatic data as the report executed; combine sections from multiple reports into a single document, with consistent formatting throughout; enable inspectors to customize their reports with photos and .PDF files; and rapidly generate professional-looking reports with a "Wow!" factor that would impress its customers. They brought in Mark Donohoe of IntuoSoft, Inc. to create the reporting engine — and Donohoe convinced them to use ActiveReports. The resulting report engine greatly exceeded Porter Valley's expectations, generating reports more than 10 times faster than their old reporting engine, and enabling users to easily customize reports and import third-party documents. Added benefits from the developer's perspective included the unprecedented flexibility provided by ActiveReports, which enabled him to rapidly create an agile reporting framework that broke new ground in reporting capabilities and could be easily integrated with any platform.
Customer Profile
Porter Valley Software, located in Porter Ranch, CA, designs reporting software for the inspection industry, including residential and commercial inspectors.
"We had some pretty advanced layout and printing requirements, and ActiveReports is the only report engine I know of that was up to the challenge."
Mark Donohoe, President, IntuoSoft, Inc.
Challenge
Porter Valley needed a rapidly-executing reporting engine that could be easily customized to incorporate external elements such as photos and .PDF files. It also had to be capable of creating a professional-looking document with consistent formatting throughout — even though it consisted of elements from several different reports.
Solution
Using Data Dynamics ActiveReports, the developer was able to rapidly create an agile reporting framework that met or exceeded all of Porter Valley's requirements, could be easily integrated with any platform, and broke new ground in reporting capabilities.
Benefits
The new reporting engine is more than 10 times faster than the old one, and enables users to create customized reports, with exactly the components they want (including photos and .PDF files), in whatever order they want. Even though a report may draw material from 10 or 20 different reports, formatting (including pagination, headers, and footers) is consistent throughout. ActiveReports also helps developers, significantly boosting their productivity, providing them with a range of capabilities not available from any other product, and adding a "fun" factor not available from other products.