Unplanned
Last Updated: 27 Dec 2016 13:29 by ADRIANO
ADRIANO
Created on: 04 Oct 2016 14:19
Type: Feature Request
3
Reload report in Viewer
Please consider giving the possibility to reload a report prepared and stored to disk in the report viewer at a later time.
5 comments
ADRIANO
Posted on: 27 Dec 2016 13:29
Hello Philip,

the application is a "one and done" kind of app we've been asked to build for a particular client (a slot machine shop here in Italy). It's used for a lottery among all the people going there and playing with slot machines.

I actually could have done what you say (persist the prize draw data locally and generate the report each and every time), it probably would have cost me a lil more time and as we are always being "chased by the devil" I am forced to cut short whatever I can, Please consider the source data (a simple flat SQL Server table) cannot be reused (I actually ask SQL Server itself to extract n random records, where n is the number of prizes up for grabs).

The idea was just to let the application persist the generated report to disk and then reload it just for display purposes. But then again i exported the generated report as PDF and used a PDF viewer to display.

I just thought it could be a good feature to implement.

TIA
Paolo 
Philip
Posted on: 23 Dec 2016 18:29
Why not just keep a history of the reports run by your user, so they can go to their history and re-run the report? The only thing that could be gained by loading the report in a form that the viewer can read would be to export it again as a different format, correct?

I'm not sure what kind of app you have, but we discourage our end users from using any report that is not financial history (those are always saved electronically and stored in database as pdf), as the data is outdated within the hour, and working with expired / outdated data can be dangerous. Exporting as anything but PDF (and not even then if someone has acrobat), gives users the opportunity to edit (and screw up intentionally or not) the report, robbing it of any reliability someone might count on. We also discourage our users from exporting as anything but PDF for that reason
ADMIN
Milen | Product Manager @DX
Posted on: 09 Nov 2016 15:44
Thank you for your input. This would be a handy feature.
ADRIANO
Posted on: 05 Nov 2016 08:01
Exactly right.

When i asked this feature i was working on a small Winforms app. I solved the problem exporting to pdf and then using the Pdfviewer instead of the report viewer.

While this didnt kill me i thought it'd be nice to have such a feature.

TIA
Paolo
ADMIN
Milen | Product Manager @DX
Posted on: 02 Nov 2016 07:02
So the idea is for the desktop viewers to introduce API to Save to file and later Load the rendered report in the report viewer, i.e., a report snapshot. Is that correct? Please elaborate.