Actuate e.report Designer Professional

Transcription

1 Product Brochure Actuate e.report Designer Professional Actuate e.report Designer Professional is a powerful development environment with which professional developers create tightly integrated, highly flexible enterprise reports for any web-enabled application. With e.report Designer Professional, developers can quickly create report designs that access any data source, deliver information in any format and present reports in any conceivable layout, no matter how graphically complex.

2 Overview Actuate e.report Designer Professional is a powerful development environment with which professional developers can quickly create tightly integrated, highly flexible enterprise reports for any webenabled application. e.report Designer Professional lets developers design reports that access any data source, deliver information in any format and present reports in any conceivable layout, no matter how graphically complex. Featuring a component and language-based environment for rapid application development (RAD) functionality and easy reusability, e.report Designer Professional is the key to delivering information-rich reports for large end-user communities rapidly and efficiently. Fast, Complete Report Design Development With e.report Designer Professional s componentbased, familiar, visual development environment, developers can bring corporate data to the web quickly and easily. With a graphical interface for specifying database interactions as well as layout, the amount of code that needs to be written is minimized. And Actuate s component-based development approach reduces development time and lowers the cost of maintenance with advanced reuse capabilities. Flexibility and Power for Precise Control e.report Designer Professional extends the visual development model with Actuate Basic, a programming language that enables precise control of enterprise report structures, data retrieval operations, formatting and other parameters. So the development team never hits a wall in terms of the kinds of enterprise reports that can be delivered, and report end users will always be satisfied. Actuate also provides unparalleled data access and formatting flexibility, with output options in DHTML, HTML, PDF, Excel, RTF and XML, to create whatever reports your organization requires. Create Personalized, Interactive, Actionable Reports Building report designs with e.report Designer Professional and deploying them with Actuate iserver delivers reports that come alive as rich, interactive and personalized pages within a web application. e.report Designer Professional includes powerful end-consumer features, such as table of contents capabilities for easy report navigation, SmartSearch for field-based search and data extraction, hyperlinks, hypercharts and interactive slice-and-dice analysis using Actuate e.analysis. e.report Designer Professional s browser scripting control delivers actionable content through form-based reports that enable users to update data, perform workflow operations or specify preferences for requesting new information. And Actuate e.report Designer Professional works with page-level security for delivering personalized data views. e.report Designer Professional s visual development environment enables developers to create high-resolution e.reports quickly. 2

3 Features and Benefits Fast Report Design Development and Maintenance Component-based report development Visual content layout Referencing and subclassing components Component-based report development e.report Designer Professional allows the publishing of customized components in libraries. These components, which specify report elements and methods that control the components behavior, can be reused across multiple designs, which enables developers to create new designs faster, while ensuring consistency from design to design. This object-oriented approach supports developer productivity, easy reporting application maintenance and easy customization to meet the needs of different business users. Visual layout Developers can design enterprise reports simply by dragging and dropping data and formatting components in a visual development environment. Most designs can be completed simply by setting properties that control component behavior and appearance. The development environment itself is similar to common Java-based integrated development environments (IDEs), such as JBuilder, Eclipse, BEA WebLogic Workshop and Microsoft Visual Studio, reducing the need for special training. Developers can change the appearance or perspective of the interface so they are only working with the windows, taskbars and buttons they need for that phase of the application s development, from building to testing and debugging. Referencing and subclassing components With e.report Designer Professional, report components are reused across designs through referencing or subclassing. Developers can maintain librarybased designs by making changes only in the source library all designs that reference that library component will automatically be updated. Developers also have the flexibility to override certain characteristics of a component by subclassing the component from the library, so that they can change characteristics they want, while inheriting all other characteristics. Frequently used e.report components can be published to shared libraries. Developing e.reports from shared components makes the content development and maintenance processes very efficient. Development Power and Precision Actuate Basic Universal page layout Complete, flexible data access Output format flexibility Smart charts and graphs Actuate Basic e.report Designer Professional features Actuate Basic, an object-oriented programming language. Actuate Basic can override methods associated with components, so developers have maximum control over their enterprise reporting options. Using Actuate Basic, developers can precisely control every aspect of enterprise reports, including structure, content, data retrieval operations, formatting and delivery. Universal page layout e.report Designer Professional s universal page layout capabilities enable the creation of reports that meet nearly any formatting requirements to create nearly any look and feel. Developers can create reports with complex formatting, such as comparisons across multiple time periods, bills of material and form-based invoices, among others. Great-looking designs enhance the usability of any report. 3

4 Complete, flexible data access e.report Designer Professional can access data in a number of ways. It can leverage Actuate s unique, unified metadata layer, composed of information objects, where data is pulled in real time from complex data sources via industry-leading Enterprise Information Integration technology and transformed into a logical map for selection. Information objects create a shareable, reusable, business-friendly meta layer for designers to create fast, complex, distributed queries that deliver operational information in real time. e.report Designer Professional accommodates report designs that display information from practically any data source, including transaction databases, business logic layers, data warehouses, flat files, Java objects, CORBA objects, OLE servers and any other data sources with a 32-bit API. In addition to ODBC connectivity, e.report Designer Professional offers high-performance native interfaces for Oracle, Sybase, IBM/Informix, IBM DB2, Progress and Microsoft SQL Server. Output format flexibility e.report Designer Professional-created report designs can be output as high-resolution DHTML pages, standard HTML pages, Adobe PDF documents, native Excel documents, RTF or XML content. This means that end users can have reports any way they want them, and can even print reports that look precisely the same on paper as they do on the web site. For XML, e.report Designer Professional enables developers to assign properties to components to add XML tags to specific fields so that the resulting reports can conform to any DTD. As a result, a single report design can deliver information for both visual and electronic consumption. Sophisticated charting and graphing to design charts, including advanced, complex charts e.report Designer Professional includes an easyto-use, powerful chart builder developers can use to quickly build graphs that can present data in a different order, format or grouping from its representation elsewhere in the same report. For instance, a developer can specify a grouping for a graph that is different from that in the rest of the report display. Graphs can display missing category values in order to appear correctly, and developers can instruct the graph to round up or down to a time interval (e.g., week, month, quarter) with a single click to a check box. In addition, graphs can automatically extend to the end of a time period (e.g., week, month, quarter). This level of automation saves developers time and effort. Personalized, Interactive, Actionable Reports Browser scripting control Page-level security Report navigability e.analysis Option Every e.report component has associated methods that control the behavior of components. Developers can override these methods using Actuate Basic to precisely control the data access and formatting of e.reports. Browser scripting control e.report Designer Professional s browser scripting control allows the easy and fast creation of actionable reports for end users. With browser scripting control, developers can create form-based reports through which users can update data, perform workflow operations or specify preferences for requesting new information. Page-level security During the report design phase, developers can assign properties to report components that determine which users can access 4

5 information contained in the report, through the page-level security function. This enables end users to automatically receive personalized views of enterprise reports based on their identity. Report navigability Actuate s unique SmartSearch and automatic table of contents generation features are automatically available with all e.reports developed with e.report Designer Professional, with no added coding or other effort required. These two interactive features make it easy for users to find precisely the information they need. Also available is the ability to jump directly to a report page without having to page down several times to that page. e.analysis Option End users can analyze e.reports developed with e.report Designer Professional using Actuate s e.analysis Option module. Users can view information in pivot-table or other graphical formats and can easily slice and dice the information as required for modeling or planning purposes, without the need for special metadata layers or data warehouses. Technical Requirements Actuate designers are supported on the following operating systems: Microsoft Windows 2000 XP Pro Server 2003 on Pentium III 450 or higher PCs, with minimum RAM of 256 MB and free disk space of 100 MB The technical requirements listed here are for guideline purposes only. Please consult Actuate Support Services for the precise requirements for your specific environment. Actuate Corporation 2207 Bridgepointe Parkway Suite 500 San Mateo, CA Tel: (888) Web: 5