I am building a data entry mobile app. I am looking for a simple SaaS reporting solution. My requirements are pretty simple. Push JSON data to the service and it spits out a report in PDF format. The transformation engine would have some sort of report definition language to customize the output. Does anything of this sort exist?
Here's a solution that's a bit more than you probably want, but with no answers for 4 months I figure a bit more work beats no answer. Windward has a web services reporting engine. (Disclaimer - I'm the CTO.) The more effort part is we do not offer it on a SAAS model so you would have to install it on your server.
Aside from that, it is exactly what you want. Upload report templates to it. Then your app can push data to a template and get back a report. And what's really nice is you design the reports in Word, Excel, and/or PowerPoint - so no learning curve and very powerful design tools.
This is a while later than your request, but possibly helpful. Docmosis has a web services interface. It sounds like it hits your requirements (JSON, PDF, customisation).
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Can anyone recommend the best web-based technology/language for rewriting a ms-access front-end? I've already converted the tables to MySql and moved all the queries into stored-procedures. The language will need to be able to handle multiple result sets.
Also, I need the GUI to be as similar as possible to the current ms-access front-end. So the new language will need to have features including full CRUD, tabbed forms, datasheet style sub-forms, combo-boxes and reports.
I've dabbled a bit with html, css, php, javascript and java but are any of these capable or suitable? I've heard that Ajax or jQuery might be the way to go.
This is a misguided goal.
Web UI uses completely different paradigms because a web front end is stateless, with unbound data, whereas Access apps are stateful and bound. A 1:1 translation will be a disastrous way to implement a UI in the web browser, unless you invest a HUGE amount in AJAX development.
That said, you should look into Access 2010 and Sharepoint Access Services, which allow you to createn Access front end with web forms and web reports that can be run in the web browser unchanged. This would likely be an order of magnitude cheaper than rolling your own AJAX-based replacement.
We are in the process of doing this. In order to keep the "spreadsheet-style forms" that we have with Access, and which include ordering and filtering capabilities as standard on all screens, we took the decision to go for silverlight + Infragistic toolkit on top of it. Up to now, we have already developped a few screens with these tools, and are quite satisfied with the result.
Where can I find a list of BMC Remedy 3rd party integrations? I have found nothing on their website, and their sales department put me in touch with the customer services which wouldn't take my call because I didn't have a customer number.
My company is looking into using BMC Remedy as a customer incident system, and it would be nice if I could integrate it with some software. For example, we could have an internal development tracking system such as Jira, Redmine, MantisBT, Trak, etc. which would integrate with Remedy. Or, have Rememdy itself integrate with something like Hudson or CruiseControl.
So far, I've found nothing that seems to integrate with Remedy -- even with software packages that have a ton of integrations like Hudson and Jira. I don't really care if there are third party proprietary integrations, but I'd like to make sure they already exist and not All you have to do is hire someone at $400 to program everything for you. I want to make sure that there is something now and not be promised it can be done, then find out you really can't do it.
I may be a bit late to the party here, but I wanted to make this info available for anybody who happened to be searching for this answer in the future. BMC Remedy has an API in Java, which uses a native library in C, as well as bindings for Perl and other languages capable of calling native code. If you can integrate with any of those languages, you can write a custom integration program and integrate with that. As 'Gary L' mentioned, Remedy can also expose any form as a web service, which, in my experience, have simple interfaces.
Since the original question was asked, BMC have created a doc with a wealth of information on their Wiki. A Swedish company, RRR, has also collected every version of the Remedy Java API and required native libraries on a single page. It appear that you no longer need a support ID to access these pages and download the API files.
Hopefully somebody finds this helpful!
Your definition of "integrate" is different from their version. Their version of integration means that if a source system exposes its data, then you can configure ARS to retrieve that information and map it to classes (forms) within their system. They have a "generic" integration system that you have to customize. It has three broad areas:
If you can connect directly to a 3rd party database and see its schema, then you can perform
retrievals of that information. We use Oracle today.
They have a java API that allows you access the ARS system for custom code (I do a lot of this).
Flat CSV file importation of data from a source system into ARS (after export).
I looked at their online support for the systems you mention (Jira, Redmine, MantisBT, Trak) and do not see anything that would accomplish any of the three above without your own customizations. With the work that I've done on this system it doesn't surprise me.
I work on a project today that writes custom code doing the items above. It is a system that is configuration/development heavy for us. Your comment: "All you have to do is hire someone at $400 to program everything for you." is not too far off from what we have to do with the system.
There is another option for Remedy integration: Web Services.
BMC Remedy makes it easy to create web services (WSDL). It creates the SOAP and XML for you. When you buy Remedy Incident Management module, it includes out-of-the-box web services that will allow it to consume and/or publish web services which make it easy to integrate with other systems on the intranet or externally. There are BMC publications which provide details on ITSM integration --- but again you will need a customer/support ID to get it from BMC's website.
Yes and no to the Web Services integration. The Version 8 system I was working on had some web services available, and they were incomplete. So I was able to do a number of functions (mostly read-only), specifically for custom display and Change Request checking, and submission of a Change Request and a Work Order. But many functions had no web service, and I ended up brute-forcing through the web user interface (with a customized browser control) to change dates on tasks, or make tasks. Ugly, but effective. There are mid-tier JavaScript calls that can be used, if you know the secret function name and can deal with the dynamic naming convention in play. For Remedy users who are desperate for some integration, there are ways it can be done.
few OOTB integrations are possible with BMC Products but if you want to do it with other you have to write webservices(REST or SOAP)
Companies like IBM or cisco has made connectors for integration with Remedy.
Just adding more detail here:
I also do a ton of direct SQL for remedy integration.
If you're careful and know what you're doing, you can have a stored proc create legal/valid records in a remedy table. (If you do it wrong, the records won't load in the client and in older versions of the windows client can actually crash the client software.)
We are looking to integrate a reporting and charting tool in our web application. The web application is based on GWT, Spring and Hibernate. The candidates that we are evaluating are
- BIRT
- Jasper Report
- Pentaho
- Crystal Report (It's not free, but being free is not the
highest priority for the project).
Some of the features that we are looking for
- How well it can integrate with the technology stack?
- How easy it is to design new reports. We want our not so technical customer to be able to do it easily?
Any insight, links experiences would be helpful.
GWT, Hibernate and JasperReports make a perfect stack.
Please take a look at Windward Reports. Without knowing more about the type of reports you need, I can't say for sure if it will be better, but in most cases it saves a lot of time over alternatives. And you can do more with it.
The unique difference is with Windward you design the reports in Microsoft Word, Excel, or PowerPoint. So it's a very powerful easy to use design tool you already know. And because Word/Excel/PPT are free-form, you can do most anything for your final report.
The following are the 3 ways that I know and would like to know the experiences from SO users.
URL-based
Report Viewer Control from Visual Studio
Web Services
Not sure what you're using as a report generator on the server side, but I've found that serving up reports in PDF format is a relatively pain-free, cross-platform way to go. Almost everybody has Adobe Reader installed.
Update: sorry, I missed the SSRS tags, but you can output SSRS reports to PDF:
http://www.codeproject.com/KB/reporting-services/PDFUsingSQLRepServices.aspx
I still recommend PDF for the delivered report format. Cross-browser and near-universal, two things that make me (and clients) very happy.
The shop that I am working part time with is new to Microsoft CRM. I just want to survey what projects have developers done to the system to extend its capabilities.
I can break the work I did into four sections:
Tailoring - Simple field level changes. A lot of this is just making sure the fields and language suited the business I was developing for.
Customisation - More complex changes, generally needing JavaScript and maybe ASP.NET. Some examples would be to use an IFrame and pass values to it from a CRM form. The IFrame would then do interesting things like mapping, charting or give you buttons to do other things. For buttons I would often times use JavaScript to replace the outerHTML in the HTML dom of an IFRAME to show a button rather.
Integration - using .NET to connect MSCRM to other systems. Connected it to Great Plains, Speech Server, SCOM (was called MOM back then), custom LOB systems etc... One interesting one I did was to develop a SSIS component that wrote into MSCRM via the web services.
Reporting - Building reports. In reporting services and in Excel. Excel made for great dashboards because of the dynamic update nature of it.
I have a few (war) stories up at http://www.sadev.co.za/taxonomy/term/7 if you are interested.
I (and others) have implemented a LINQ query provider for the web service layer http://www.codeplex.com/LinqtoCRM.
I did some work with CRM 3.0. My work enhanced the program and turned it into a Document Management app, where you could scan and upload documents based on a case, contact, customer, vendor etc. The .NET SDK back then could have used a bit more work, but I hear with newer versions of CRM it has gotten better. CRM allows for attachments but not at all levels, more at the case level.
We extended 3.0 to send text messages rather than email. There are tools available (for 4.0 at least) to do that now, though.
We also extended it to push service appointments through to Exchange, as due to the workforce being mostly mobile they did not have the CRM client for Outlook.
Two other major areas of development not yet mentioned are plugins and custom workflow assemblies.
Plugins allow you to intercept many of the messages that CRM processes to insert custom logic. The possibilities this gives you are endless because you can intercept all kinds of messages including Create, Update, Delete, and even Read!
Custom workflow assemblies are assemblies that you register with CRM that integrate with CRM's workflow UI. Often times, they perform simple tasks that are useful when modifying form data. Other times, they are more complex like sending status reports.
Custom workflow assemblies are always listed beneath the native options. In the screenshot, everything below "Stop Workflow" was added via a custom workflow assembly.