Hi,
I've been working on BOb for the last couple of months producing reports for our user base and have the following observations.
1. As per most packages of this type, when you want to do something other than run-of-the-mill tutorial stuff, it can be a real pain.
2. To make life easy for developers, it looks as though you need the SDK (extra!), otherwise, for example, you have to re-enter a query for every report you want to use it in.
3. Very few users actually want to change and design their own reports. Most of them don't have time. It seems to mainly be finance people, who play with spreadsheets all day anyway B-)
4. Trying to reproduce detailed legacy reports is very difficult and in order to make them more maintainable, we have had to split them up - not popular with users.
5. The VBA options are limited in reports, so really detailed customisation (a la Access for example) is out.
6. Designing a report for printing with a nice company logo and header is fine. Publish that report to HTML and the header is lost and you see detail only. According to BOb support, this is perfectly normal as the web is not split into pages (!?), therefore they cannot include header information. So you would need to create and maintain 2 reports, 1 for printing and 1 for the web (where you would embed your logo into the main report body). Unless, of course, you want an anonymous web page (did I say page ?).
7. At the end of the day, it all depends on what you want to do and what you need to support. The semantic layer is OK, but it's yet another level of development and support. So really you need to ask what your users want and how much effort do THEY expect to exert to produce it ?
just my 2 pennorth.
regards,
Graham
