Data Dynamics Reports with SQL Server Reporting Services

Both Data Dynamics Reports and Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services use Microsoft Report Definition Language (RDL) as their reporting format. Data Dynamics Reports supports the SQL Server 2005 version of the RDL specification and adds a number of enhancements of its own.

This is significant because Data Dynamics Reports and its rich Reporting designers and End-user reporting tools can be used as a front-end to SQL Server Reporting Services platform in much more native way.

For example, other than the richer reporting tools for report authors and end users and the excellent programming SDK, you would also want to use Data Dynamics Reports as a front-end for its excellent Microsoft Excel integration for your data published via Microsoft SQL Reporting services.

As long as your SQL Reporting files are using the 2005 version RDL, they can be directly consumed, edited and presented using Data Dynamics Reports tools.

The reverse is also true as long as you are NOT using the Data Dynamics Reports extensions to the RDL in your Data Dynamic Report designer. if you stick to the default RDL design elements while still benefiting from the design experience, you can design, edit and save the reports and be confident that they will be compatible with SQL Server Reporting Services out-of-the-box.

Beyond the default 2005 RDL implementation, Data Dynamics Reports extends the RDL in the following ways:

1. Master Reports are similar in design to Master Pages in ASP.NET. Reports can specify a live-template that provides a common set of report items, data sources, data sets, report theme, and report parameters.
2. Report Themes allow report authors to easily follow a consistent look for their reports by providing a set of colors, fonts, and images.
3. Data Visualizer functions allow the user to display a graphic based on some set of data instead of forcing the user to read individual values. A color scale selects a color from a range based on a value from that range. A data bar or range bar displays a rectangle with the length dependant on the value. An optional progress indicator can be used as well. The icon set allows the report to display one of the pre-defined images to represent the state of some data.
4. FormattedText Report Item: Renders XHTML and CSS into your reports
5. Barcode Report Item: Supports over 20 of the most popular barcode types
6. Banded List data region: Gives report authors the free form placement of the List data region with enhanced grouping support
7. Enhanced chart control with additional chart types not found in SSRS
8. Enhanced PDF support with built in security options, font embedding, and font subsetting
9. Report API allows developers to create and render reports programmatically without using the viewer or designer controls.
10. The Designer control allows your end-users to create their own reports with the same design capabilities as found in the Visual Studio 2005 IDE.
11. The Viewer controls allow the full functionality of Data Dynamics Reports; connect to any supported data source, use any of the custom report items, or custom rendering extensions.

The key features page is a great source to quickly get an overall view of Data Dynamics Reports.

Embedded business intelligence for .NET

Embedded business intelligence is fast becoming mainstream and is defined as real time business reporting and analytics integrated within transactional systems and interoperating with other systems and subsystems.

To enable true embedded .NET reporting and embedded analytics, the tools should be:
1. programmable,
2. open,
3. interoperable, and
4. follow architectural standards and guidelines.
5. Integrate deeply with Microsoft Visual Studio.NET, the primary development tool for .NET developers
6. Be compatible with with Microsoft's BI technologies such as Microsoft Excel and SQL Server reporting Services (SSRS).

All three .NET reporting and BI tools under the ActiveReports suite (ActiveReports, Data Dynamics Reports and Data Dynamics Analysis) are designed for .NET programming from the ground up. Other than the full-fledged Software Development Kit (SDK), even the report builders and end user reporting and analysis tools can not only be embedded and deployed royalty-free for end users but they can be customized and features enabled and disabled via programming.

They are open because they offer flexible customization via their extensive programming interface. In future, the programming model will get even more similar to each other so programmers can reuse their knowledge of one tool to work effectively with another.

On interoperability, software developers have long used ActiveReports with third-party .NET Chart components such as Dundas, ChartFX, Telerik and others to design best of breed systems. ActiveReports comes in both COM/ActiveX and the .NET versions.

A great interoperability feature of Data Dynamics Reports is that it provides full featured Microsoft Reporting Definition Language (RDL) based Report designers and end user reporting tools. Easy to use RDL Report builders are one of the lesser highlighted benefits of the Reports product. Data Dynamics Reports uses and extends RDL for new reporting elements and behaviors.

As a result, some of our customers are using Data Dynamics Reports on top of Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS). Others are able to switch from one technology to another without having to redesign or rewrite code.

Data Dynamics Reports also offers a much truer Excel transformation so the integration with Microsoft Excel goes beyond just exporting of data. More details are elsewhere on this blog. Be sure to check out the screencast.

Data Dynamics Analysis is used for including embedded analytics into your .NET applications. It continues the same design guidelines for openness and interoperability, but adds touches of its own, for e.g. the ability to analyze both structured and unstructured data, and a permission based security model so existing application security policies can be applied to the data analysis features as well.

While all three products enable embedded business intelligence, for a comparison of these from a business needs perspective, be sure to check out this posting.

Advanced .NET Data Visualization for reporting

Most BI tools support some sort of basic data visualization features. For example, you can take tabular data and convert it into charts, trend lines and basic conditional formatting.

Advanced data visualization for business reporting goes beyond simple charts and includes:

• Spark lines, a highly compact trend line so you can fit multiple trend lines in a small region
• Bullet graphs that includes target indicators within bar charts
• Heat maps that display a set of variables as slightly differentiating colors

Data Dynamics Reports enables .NET developers to embed these advanced data visualization features into their applications with minimal effort.

Bullet Graphs
The bullet graph replaces dashboard gauges and meters as they implicate a number of major issues:

1. They display too little information.
2. They take too much space.
3. They are overloaded with distracting decoration details, which carry no valuable message.

The bullet graph overcomes these display issues.
Examples of bullet graphs are:






Spark Lines

The Sparkline contributes to a more unbiased data analysis as it clearly demonstrates general changes in time along with local details. Consuming not more than 14 letterspaces of the horizontal length and being as high as the surrounding text, sparklines can be easily included in dashboards, reports, and other documents.
Data Dynamics Reports provides a user with several sparkline types:

Line
Line sparkline is widely used in financial and economic data analysis and is based on a continuous flow of data. The currency exchange rates, changes in price are the examples of application of this type of sparklines.



Area
The Area sparkline is similar to the Line sparkline but visually you see the space under the line as shaded.


Stacked Bar
The Stacked bar sparkline is presented as a horizontal bar with different segment lengths marked by distinct color hues. The Stacked bar illustrates how the various segments of a part-to-whole relationship correspond to one another; the largest segment represents the highest value and the change in brightness indicates a new value on a scale.


Column
The Column sparkline is used for sports scores, cash register receipts, and other cases where previous values and the current value do not closely influence one another. In this case you are dealing with discrete data points, and not a continuous flow of data as in the Line sparkline.


Whisker
The Whisker sparkline is typically used in win/loss/tie or true/false scenarios. This type is similar to the Column sparkline, but it renders a tie (0 value) in a different manner.



Color Scales (to generate Heat Maps)
Color scale maps a numeric value onto a range of colors, reducing the complexity of dealing with a large number of discrete data elements.



Icon Sets
Icon Sets distill information into status flags and corresponding images, based on either absolute or calculated values.



Data Dynamics Reports comes with standard icon sets.



Custom Icon sets
Custom icon sets must conform to the following rules.

1. The format must be of a type that is handled by the .NET framework.
2. The size of the strip must be 120 x 24 pixels.
3. Each image must be 24 x 24 pixels in size.
4. There must be no more than five images in the strip.
5. If there are fewer than five images in the strip, there must be blank spaces in the image to fill in.

More information is available in the product documentation.

Microsoft Excel and .NET reporting

One feature where Data Dynamics Reports excels (no pun intended) is integrating .NET reporting with true Microsoft Excel transformation, beyond just basic export

More than a simple export, the Excel Transformation Device allows users to change their reports into useful Excel spreadsheets and take full advantage of all Excel has to offer. They can export complex reports, customize appearance while exporting, bind data to Excel charts or pivot tables and see the display change as they perform what-if analysis. Report authors and software developers can create their own templates with charts pre-bound to the data.

Here, you can see an early video of the Excel feature.

For a first hand experience, one can download a free trial version.

Interactive cross tabs/pivot tables (which product supports them)

Yesterday, we saw how ActiveReports compares with Data Dynamics Reports from a business reporting perspective.

As if to underscore the difference, we had someone ask us today whether ActiveReports supports interactive cross tabs, a quintessential BI feature also known as pivot tables or even more loosely speaking "BI" in another parlance.

This also underscore today's business reality that the traditional boundary lines between standard reporting as we know it and business (intelligence) reporting are fast blurring and users (and therefore .NET developers) need a toolset that can span across the spectrum instead of being a limitation.

To answer the question, not surprisingly, it is the Data Dynamics Reports product (not ActiveReports) that meets this particular requirement, targeted as it is towards business users and business reporting.

if you had to go one step further and include true analysis/BI capabilities, the Data Dynamics Analysis product would be an even better fit.

We usually recommend our customers to give both products a try and find out which one really meets their specific needs.

A Business needs comparison of ActiveReports, Data Dynamics Reports and Data Dynamics Analysis

A lot of times, people ask about how and where to use the three different .NET reporting and business tools from GrapeCity-Data Dynamics. Let's use this post to briefly compare them at a high level from a BUSINESS needs perspective.

A high level technical comparison is featured here.

ActiveReports for .NET is the industry defining .NET reporting tool that has successfully enabled over 50,000 registered users to meet typical Standard (a.k.a Production) Reporting business needs (high volume, large operational staff, less strategic impact) of their .NET applications over the last decade., such as:

• Flexible customization so developers can really have any kind of report format they want
• High performance for huge data being reported on for large number of users
• Scalable across large number of users
• WYSIWYG Printing/Rendering to help readability of complex multi-data reports
• Advanced Paging capabilities to help navigation of complex, long reports
• Wide range of export formats to cater to internal and external customers

Data Dynamics Reports includes all of the ActiveReports features such as performance, scalability, WYSIWYG rendering/printing and in fact, more exporting features, but it also supports these typical Business Reporting needs: (mid volume, information workers, higher strategic impact)

• True Microsoft Excel transformation to enable legacy business users
• Interoperability with other IT systems (i uses and extends Microsoft's Reporting Definition Language (RDL) format
• Business User friendly with full page layout designers, in line scripting (without the need to write code)
• Dashboard/KPI Reporting to incorporate dashboard features into your reporting
• Data trends reporting to report on time lines and business trends
• Consistent look and feel via Corporate Reporting templates
• Easy to change styles via simple configurations

Data Dynamics Analysis for .NET is the most different and is really meant for embedding out-of-the-box, customizable Business Analysis features (niche volume, decision makers, highest strategic impact) into your .NET applications.

• Multi-dimensional interactive data analysis from the ground up
• Analyze both structured and unstructured data for Analysis without bounds
• Customizable End User visual analysis tools
• Multiple views of same data to provide insights that would otherwise go unnoticed
• Easy drag/drop user interface for end users of your .NET application
• Backtrack/retrace analysis steps so you can always come back to where you started from
• Permission based security to enable only appropriate business users can see the information

Hopefully this provides some insights into where the products stand with respect to each other in the context of the full business intelligence life cycle.