We have multiple people in multiple departments developing Cognos 7 reports which get deployed to a web server. Months later, questions come in and we don't know who developed the report, who they developed it for, and what problem it is supposed to solve.
There does not seem to be any place to put this kind of metadata in an .imr file, so we are thinking of creating a template hidden text box.
Have others solved this?
Is there a more standard way?
The usual way is to use a source control system:
Configuring a source control system for Cognos Framework Manager metadata
Related
Before: We had (still working) a couple of CRM 4.0 servers working: A productive one and a test one. We would perform any changes on the test server first and, after testing, replicate them in the productive server. For entities (custom or not) this would mean using the "Export Customizations"/"Import Customizations" functionalities. Pretty straight-forward stuff.
Now: we're testing CRM 2013 and trying to do the same with a couple of servers. We set up our data structure by hand (took some time) including the creation of all our custom entities, which are not few in number.
My question then is: How can I perform a bulk entity export-import in the same manner as it was with 4.0? I've tried selecting saving the entities to a Solution package, export the package from one server and import it onto the other. System entities feature in the target-server's import list but not the custom entities! And they are a part of the original solution packet (both checking it through CRM itself or the package file's XML code directly)
The lack of online help on this may imply that I'm not approaching this in the right way and I presume this is something already standard in CRM 2011.
Can someone give me a hint?
Thanks in advance!
Ok, I have no time to delve into reasons and explanations but things got solved.
I tried to export ONLY the custom entities and their related entities and it ended up working out.
Afterwards, trying again to export ALL entities ended up working just fine!
Therefore, i'm still not fully convinced I was not doing anything wrong. Most likely I just missed some essential basic small step or detail no one thought of due to it's "self-evident" nature.
(I guess being too stuck to CRM 4.0's "modus operandi" takes it's toll when updating...)
I am new for Coded UI. We want to use Coded UI to test Sharepoint portals.While running few tests, we came across the following questions.
How does it support if control Id's are generated dynamically?
How much support does it give to test Sharepoint out of box features?
Does it support Third-party asp.net controls?
Please let me know if you have any conclusion for these questions and also share the limitations of Coded UI for Sharepoint features.
Please provided useful links if any.
How does it support if control Id's are generated dynamically?
We have a (non Sharpoint) project with this situation. No problems until now. The record-tool finds normally enough informations (name, position, content, parent) to identify the control.
How much support does it give to test Sharepoint out of box features?
Sorry I haven't expirience to this, but can't imaging that there are to many problems.
Does it support Third-party asp.net controls?
Yes. We use controls form DevExpress - works fine.
Links
In this case I can really recommend you the MSDN Pages to this topic. They provide some good hints in context of working with CUIT.
I'm looking into upgrading a .net 2.0 app. The app is used by the public authorities of a certain city to keep track of expenses and generate reports and forms.
The reports and forms were generated in VS2005 using Crystal report. They follow a well defined layout, like official documents usually do.
I am looking at options to upgrade the application and the main problem I have is in determining how to deal with the crystal report files.
I have successfully upgraded to VS2008, but any version after that doesn't have CR anymore, so my company would have to pruchase CR separately and because the client and my company are both tight, I'm looking at alternatives...
The obvious one is using SSRS. I have never touched it before in my life, but after playing around with it for a bit, I get the impression that it is not very well suited to generating forms with lots of non-tabular content and lots of formatting. Or am I wrong?
It seems that every line has to be drawn separately. There is no (that I can see) accurate way of positioning lines for formatting...
But I'm just a beginner, so I might be getting this all wrong?
If that is the case, are there any other alternatives to CR and SSRS?
I was thinking of maybe having a separate MVC web site project in the solution. Have that generate the layout in html and css with data from my entity model, then view the result in a (built-in or not) web browser. Am I overcomplicating on this?
I really need advice from somebody who's done that kind of thing before.
What SSRS is good for:
Talking to SQL Server, much faster than other products as it in many cases retains the database better when in other programs IMHO they repeat query at times.
Designing collapsable grids and chart objects from datasets. You can have 'groups' that can nest aggregates of collapsed values and can be un collapsed or collapsed on demand based on expressions, parameters, or a recusive parent set.
A web service for deployment ease where you can deploy one or many objects. You can also write add ons for this service with C# and the ReportingService.asmx web service.
You can talk to the web service directly in a 'form' object in HTML and manipulate it's output.
You can schedule reports to send out via email and file saves automatically to clients or internal users.
What SSRS IS NOT GOOD FOR:
It is not event driven hardly at all except for parameters. You cannot click on many things and get other parts on the form itself to update. You may do an 'action' that goes to another location, report, or site. But in essence you are calling a seperate object, not the same instance again.
Multiple layers of reporting. Beyond tweaking tool tips you cannot do 'hover over' reporting without hacking SSRS. You can make javascript windows show other reports but it is not baked in to SSRS. So you are either clicking into new reports or tab stops in a report but not getting hover over quick objects beyond text and expressions that are in tool tips.
What do you want before considering what you need to impement?
I want to input and export things while talking to my database - ASP.NET with potentially HTML 5 or MVC4 if you want to be very new. ASP.NET is made for actively talking to a server and taking commands IN as well as OUT.
I want a form to auto update periodically on a page as a landing site and dashboard - AJAX and Javascript on top of HTML, Java or ASP.NET.
I want to create reports that exist on a Server and can be hosted on a wide variety of platforms in .NET via web service calls - SSRS.
SSRS's biggest selling point to me is it's reusability once you dial a report in. They are pretty easy to create, easy to configure, easy to deploy, and if you get a little advanced in calling the webservice you can get SSRS report objects in other technologies if you want.
There is Crystal reports for VS2010 and VS2012. It is just not shipped with them. You can download the installation from here: http://scn.sap.com/docs/DOC-7824
I am running through the same decision process at this time. There is a .NET product from a company called "Windward" that will allow you to design your reports in Microsoft Office. If you are in the MS ecosystem already or want your users to design reports instead of always calling on you, this might help.
Their template design tool is called AutoTag and you can deploy these template to their .NET based engine in a few lines of code.
I know the question is regarding SSRS vs. Crystal comparison but thought you should know there are other alternatives and some can make life easier
Ryan
I have an issue with a new sharepoint install that we've recently deployed to replace an ageing content management system that I implemented a few years ago.
What I'd really like is to save my colleagues as much effort as possible by transferring the content from my CMS into sharepoint.
I'm not very good with sharepoint yet, and my development platform of choice is PHP MySQL, so basically I'm wondering if sharepoint has any facility to import sites, I can easily built filters to reformat the content in my CMS into whatever (please let it be XML) format sharepoint will accept but I have no idea if sharepoint will even let me do this.
I have limited access to the sharepoint server, although in this case I can probably negotiate more if that's the only way.
Mostly I just need some pointers - does sharepoint have any facility to do this, and where do I start doing it?
Thanks
SharePoint has the ability to import data from an Excel spreadsheet (Site Actions > Create > Import Spreadsheet).
The only problem you may run into with this method is that you don't necessarily have full control over what column types the importer uses for your data--if that's important, then it will take some trial and error.
If you're familiar with .NET and you can get access to run a program on the server, you can write a program to import data into existing lists using the SharePoint object model.
the fastest way to bulk import data into SharePoint is through the batchdata method
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/microsoft.sharepoint.spweb.processbatchdata.aspx
it is aimed ad importing list data, but it seems there are some workarounds to make it work with publishing pages
http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/sharepoint/en-US/f8fe190d-c1ed-4e15-bda2-7792211973cc/bulk-publishing-page-creation-using-processbatchdata?forum=sharepointdevelopmentlegacy
Report design, generation and maintenance isn't hard, but it is dull. We have a number of legacy (to quite different degrees of legacy) reports in Crystal Reports XI. These are designed for A4/PDF - not necessarily printed, but to be of a predictable layout and there's no possibility of us retiring them any time soon.
All connect to existing stored procedures (SQL Server 2005) to acquire their data. A lot of time has been sunk in getting these reports to look just so. The actual creation of reports is mostly done via the .NET/C# API and exported to PDF. There are a number of locally developed and maintained applications that are stable and handle this process well.
So we like the fact that Crystal Reports is stable, that our apps produce these reports reliably, that the PDF output is consistent and that when the Crystal Reports template is approved and set, it just works.
There are some big problems with this situation though. The biggest being that any changes to the underlying report templates themselves are a huge pain; getting the Crystal Reports template to a point that users are happy is a royal hassle and can involve a long iteration of DTP/graphics/database/reconciliation and myriad other niggles.
Combine that with Crystal Reports being a relatively rare skill and not one people want to admit to, we are trying to think up alternative solutions.
Some thoughts I've started to consider - and any others welcome!
Does Crystal Reports 2008 offer any benefits over XI?
How have others managed a migration away from CR? And what to?
Given the data access layer is well formed, perhaps generate graphs via an Excel service and then import them as graphics to a framework template? Crystal, another - has anyone tried anything like this?
Is Reporting Services any better? (We have some RS skillz but again, another thing that people are loath to actually own up to knowing anything about.)
Are there any layout tools available (preferably with a .NET API) for what, in the old days, would be called Desktop Publishing? If we have graphics/tables/other objects as images that could then be rendering automatically,
Ideally I want to move to a solution where the users are in greater control of the underlying changes, and whether this can be handled programatically within tools that we can provide to them and so that I can be coding rather than editing Crystal Reports templates.
So what other problems are you having with Crystal? Sounds like you want the users to handle the reporting...(don't we all). The problem with that is they never want to use whatever data model is offered. Someone has to know how to query the database. You already have that by using stored procedures. Maybe let a couple users learn basic crystal principals (grouping, sorting, summing, etc) and you write the stored procedure and they format it with crystal. That way you bypass the biggest stumbling block with crystal, which is doing the table joins in crystal.
I have crystal knowledge and think it's fairly easy to use. I wouldn't call it skillz though, more like I know what it can and can't do, so I can save myself a lot of time.
I'm not trying to defend Crystal, but if it ain't broke...
We recently upgraded to VS 2008 on XP. Our users are still running the .NET 2.0 framework on Win2K, and a company-wide upgrade is not in our near future. What we didn't find out until we'd already upgraded from 2005 to 2008 is that the Crystal Reports redistributables that come with VS 2008 only work on XP or higher. Oops. So, we're now unable to edit our old reports because CR will automatically update it to the new version.
What I wound up doing is using our existing XMLSerializer, building a class that holds the report data (lots of string and List<T> properties, essentially), and serializing it to an XML file. Insert an XSL stylesheet declaration that transforms it to HTML/CSS, and open it in IE.
It's wound up being quite a bit faster than Crystal Reports, particularly for development, and I can typically have them just give me a Word document of whatever the hell they want the report to look like, export it as HTML, clean it up, and then use that as a template for what the XSL generates.
It's nowhere near as full-featured as Crystal Reports, but for what we need (XRay and Lab reports and work orders), it's perfect.