Report writing creates an expensive bottleneck for many companies because it demands ongoing, iterative involvement from in-house developers. Windward Reports has thus created a white paper that addresses this issue with respect to the company’s product.

Report writing is costly and time consuming, the company points out in the white paper. The people who need the reports – business users-- generally can’t create them without the help of a programmer or developer. Creating reports becomes an iterative process. The business user enlists the developer’s help.

The white paper notes that this endless report design process is very slow, expensive and frustrating for all departments involved. Its product is designed to solve this problem, through an innovative approach that utilizes an enterprise-level reporting engine that uses Microsoft Word, or any other word processor such as Open Office, to design a report template.

Windward Reports design platform can be called by java or .NET programs, either directly or in a client-server configuration. Windward Reports includes AutoTag, an add-in for Microsoft Word which greatly simplifies data layout and data source mapping, the white paper says, eliminating the expense and frustration of the iterative report development process.

Tags are added to the template to indicate where data will be merged into the template to create the final report. The simplest tag is the out tag, whose format is <wr:out select=’/root/name’/>.

In this case, the tag will be replaced with the name of the customer from the xml data merged with the template. While the entire tag can appear in the template, AutoTag displays just the tag name. Placing the cursor over the tag name pops up a tooltip that displays the entire tag. In addition, when using AutoTag, there is no mistyping of tags in the template. 

The complete white paper can be found at the company’s website: www.windwardreports.com

Published Aug. 16, 2005 — Reads 7,339
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