How do I create a printable report in Kiwi TCMS? - kiwi-tcms

I want to create a printable report of a test run in Kiwi TCMS version 9.0.1. However I cannot find any way to accomplish this. Can someone explain how to get this done?
According to https://kiwitcms.org/blog/kiwi-tcms-team/2019/03/03/legacy-reports-become-telemetry/ this feature should be available.
Feature: Printable Test Execution Report
As a tester I want to have a nice looking TestRun execution report which I can present to my >managers, stakeholders and/or customers. The page needs to be printer friendly for “Print to >PDF” or print on paper!
Kiwi TCMS already has this feature. Clicking the [Report] button ...
It seems that the report button has been removed in favor of the telemetry button though.

However I cannot find any way to accomplish this.
Just try printing the TestRun page. It looks good in its new design and that's why there's no separate page which rearranges the data in a printer-friendly way. The current layout should be printer friendly as it is.
If there's something missing/not quite right that's an improvement request which should go into GitHub Issues.

Digging through the patch notes, I have found that this feature was removed in Kiwi TCMS version 6.6, see https://github.com/kiwitcms/Kiwi/blob/master/CHANGELOG.rst#kiwi-tcms-66-19-mar-2019
Remove legacy reports.
and https://github.com/kiwitcms/Kiwi/issues/657
We are planning to remove the existing reports feature because they are not well designed and the code internally is a huge blob that can't be extended very easily. Kiwi TCMS team would like to reimplement existing functionality that folks find useful, add new types of reports (incl. nicer graphics and UI) and make it possible for the reporting sub-system to be more easily extendable.
So I guess the blog entry is a bit misleading and it is currently not possible to create printable reports using Kiwi TCMS version 9.0.1, save for writing a private plugin that adds this functionality.

Related

How to create a setup of an Windows application using PowerBuilder

I am a newbie for PowerBuilder and for Windows application. I have few projects which consists corresponding code in it and after merging all that I get the final product. The problem I am facing right now is that I don't know how to make a setup of my Windows app using PowerBuilder. If I can get step by step procedure with tiny explanation, I will be able to achieve it already. Have tried Google but ended up with complex confusion. I have created the .exe, but that .exe does not work on any other computer. So please guys help me out.
Thanks
There are two parts to creating a setup program for your application: defining the files and other resources that need to deployed, and building those resources into a setup executable package.
For defining files and resources, you've made it impossible for anyone to even take a shot by referring to two very different (but similar origins) versions of the product in your tags: PowerBuilder (aka PowerBuilder Classic) and PowerBuilder.NET. The deployment requirements for apps built from each of these is very different. However, even if we knew, the best advice is to go through the manuals and review what is required of the features of your specific application. (e.g. if you don't use rich text, deploying the files required to support it would be a waste). A generic list is, IMHO, just bad advice.
As far as building a setup package goes, the first decision is which package building software to pick (none comes with PowerBuilder). Any Windows setup package builder should do. I've used InstallShield and Inno, vastly preferring the latter (after many years of using the former). I know you want steps to walk you through, but a walk through is impossible before picking the software, and frankly, walk throughs of these setup building software has been done elsewhere much better than I'd do.
The bottom line is that the answer isn't as simple as you seem to have been hoping, but it is attainable.
Good luck,
Terry.

WinForms.ReportViewer to display customerized item?

I am designing a reporting page using WinForms.ReportViewer and only process the data locally. It means we want to display some information from objects that we designed. For example, we have our own classes for date and time. However, in the report page this date and time information can not be displayed correctly (shows #ERROR). Is there any way to tell it how to show our information? Thanks!
With the newer ReportViewer versions, MS has introduced an error that disables the possibility for navigation within objecs.
They have corrected the error with the last service pack a little and if your objects support serialization, now navigation may work.
For my newer projects built with report viewer 2010, I have started to write a wrapper for each object/entity I have to render. I started with this during the time, no fix was available and now I'm very comfortable with this pattern. In the first moment, it gives a little more of work, but it has given me great flexibility and left my code clean. And if one day I dont have the patience to work further with report viewer anymore, it will make it easy to move my projects to another reporting engine.

Best reporting solution on top of SQL Server?

I'm looking to build a reporting portal on top of our database which is SQL Server 2008 R2.
It's been suggested that I use SSRS, and I've played around with it for a few hours. I found it very easy to point it to a table and have it generate a table/graphs for you. It could all be done in a few minutes, and that's great.
I had a hard time customizing the report to make it look nice. I thought it was like using Word to design a website, the customization was pretty limited. I have experience in web development using ASP.NET with jQuery, and I'm currently thinking that I could make the portal much faster if I could use my experience with those technologies.
I'd like to get advice on which path is best for my project.
Queries to the db are fairly simple, but not trivial. I have no problem building the data and business layers myself by using Linq-to-Sql.
I do not need print support
I need an emailing system that sends out reports every day, which I can also build myself (it doesn't need to let users subscribe to reports)
Don't need the flexibility of having users create their own reports. This is only for 2-3 different reports.
I enjoy the development experience using web technologies and feel comfortable building a pleasant user experience with jQuery and plugins. I fear that using SSRS, I would be limited to something ugly and not "fun" to use.
I want this project to be up in 2-3 weeks. I can't afford to re-invent the wheel for everything, but I also don't want to spend most of my time asking questions like "how do I make a fade-in effect in ssrs?"
How easy is it to customize the UI? Are there good examples online of what can be achieved? Does SSRS have some advantage that I could hardly get by writing my custom solution? I'm thinking in terms of application performance and overall functionality.
Thanks for your input.
I have built custom web interface to a suite of SSRS reports. You can easily do this, and submit the gathered report parameters to Reporting Services, and have it render the generated report to a web page, all as if the user had used the SSRS interface to begin with.
Some comments i would make:
let SSRS handle the reporting side of things. It has all the power and features you could need. And its free. And tested. And extensible. And renders to multiple (printable) formats.
you could maybe look at buying a set of controls designed to be used with SSRS to get even nicer chart output
you can build your own (parameter gathering & report triggering) interface within three weeks, but the schedule will be tight
you can't use jQuery within the rendered reports. A lot of the HTML within the rendered report is hardcoded template type code (styles etc are embedded into the report rather than linking to an external file)
you don't need jQuery fade-in panels to make your reports pretty :)
So, as you know SSRS allows web and winforms output, printing, and all that. But your users will undoubtedly end up bugging your for PDF and Excel exporting, which is also built-in.
It's also a lot easier to edit the reports without having to alter your app and as you mentioned it has the emailing built in.
SSRS is quite powerful if you play around with the grouping and parameterization. The designer is a little clunky as you make more complicated reports, but I've always been able to design what I want. I've not used Crystal Reports but presumably it's even more powerful but it is another thing to learn and obtain.
I use 2 main reporting tools (Business Objects and SSRS) and also Microsoft Access. I can honestly say that I prefer SSRS for 95% of the work I do. The users really like all the drill through options you can do. For example lets say you have a chart showing widgets sold, you can click on that bar of the bar graph and have it drill to a report showing a breakdown of which widgets were sold.
This ability of going from a “high level” to low level detail is really powerful to the users. As for looks, I quite like the default controls that ship with report builder 3.0, they have come a long way and just look what is around the corner with project crescent
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/sqlrsteamblog/archive/2010/11/09/a-glimpse-at-project-crescent.aspx
I know it's probably not a WEB-BASED technology but I would definitely give Crystal Reports a try. Specially considering your time constraints...

What is major Difference between Adobe Flex and Microsoft Silverlight?

I want to develop a web Application to manage school administration. But I am not clear, which technology should I use to create Rich Internet Application. At present, develeopment company is going with ASP.net tools and say this is a web app.
However, there is page refresh on every click. Which I don't like. Please suggest, where to proceed.
Regards
Piyush
In a plain ol ASP.NET application, the screen refresh can be eliminated by using update panels in webforms, or by using more of the AJAX capabilities of the MVC Framework. (Wikiplex on Codeplex has a crazy simple example of this that I love in their example application).
Between Silverlight and Flash, however, Silverlight is designed to be a Web Application, or (at times) a desktop application in a Browser, while Flash is more of a multimedia framework.
Since it is school administration, which doesn't require random people to have Silverlight installed, Silverlight and JS/AJAX are both good options. Both are built into the ASP.NET set of libraries, and have good support in Visual Studio. Flash is a bit of an outsider in this regard.
So to sum up:
In general JavaScript/AJAX > Silverlight but either would be great.
If you are totally against any screen refresh, I'd lean more towards Silverlight.
If the developers are very familiar with Flash and communicating with the server with Flash, then I'd say it is also an option, but with no knowledge on all three and I'd not pick Flash first.
It's a little late for a response to the initiator. But I didn't agree with some of the answers I read here, and since google is popping this up in the search returns I felt compelled to align my answer on this board.
First off, a lot of developers create applications in ASP.NET and AJAX because they are comfortable with it not because the technology is better. For years, what it took one person to develop in the Adobe Flex framework, took many developers to create in AJAX. There is no more AJAX versus Flex, there's just Flex. Who wants to write a hundred lines of code in AJAX to do the same thing it takes 1 line of code in Flex. That's why the cost with an AJAX deployment was always more expensive.
On ASP.NET, you're right. Who wants to see the page refresh every time you perform an action? Not to mention, no browser follows the HTML implementations exactly, so how .NET app looks in 1 browser would look different in another browser, in addition to differences witnessed with the various browser versions.
Most ASP.NET, heck even Coldfusion Applications are clunky in HTML. So with that in mind all of my gui development is done in Adobe Flex. When a flash file is created, it compatible with 99% of the browsers (safari on mobile devices excluded), and all of the Operating Systems are supported. I'll tell you what, you can get silverlight to work in linux but have fun while it loads 50MB of MS software on your Linux OS. Not to mention Flash has a 99% market penetration. So it's already preloaded on machines and browsers.
Plus flash supports most picture formats and SVG natively. Did you know Silverlight became notorious because they don't support even a GIF/BMP formats? Forget SVG if you're using Silverlight because it doesn't support it. What's SVG? Look it up! It's only the most useful way to create any image you want right in a flex app. For instance maps are useful in SVG. AND its just a small file. Not a horrendous large file.
Language, Flex is just easier to program in and there's a lot of support for it. Think I'm kidding, try for yourself. You can download a Free version of flex for 30 days. Forgive my ignorance but I don't even know where to begin on loading Silverlight. I've got visual studio and all that but I gave up after trying. But that was 1 year after it's release so it may have changed.
And frankly, if you or a developer can't afford flex, DON'T BUY IT. Instead, download eclipse, which is free forever. Adobe Flex is only a special iteration customized by Adobe anyway. So you probably won't get charting and some other components in eclipse, but most of the GUI components are built right into Eclipse.
Programming ASP.NET is just old hat. It's clunky, difficult to work with and it's possible to corrupt the files. It's not possible at all to corrupt your project files in Flex/Eclipse because they are just TEXT files. How cool is that?
Don't get me wrong, I program in ASP.NET too. But I like it for Application server processes; you know like the middleman between database and client. SQL server feeds ASP, and ASP feeds my Flex GUI using SOAP. Big plus is even though I hate Visual studio crystal reports, it's still way better than nothing. Believe me you want to have some reporting possibilities like CF Report Builder or crystal reports. Some people just like a nicely formatted PDF and that's all there is to it.
I've released hundreds of applications using various technologies. Right now this is my favorite. But frankly, a good GUI can be done anywhere if you are a 'kung fu' master. I'm saying that although it's easier out of the gates to program in Flex compared to .NET/Silverlight, someone with some mad .NET skills can put a Flex app to shame. But as it stands right now, there is no argument that Flex is the stronger candidate with the most market penetration, flexibility, and ease of use.
Good luck all...
ASP.NET does provide some special sauce for AJAX, so it's entirely possible to eliminate the page load without leaving ASP.NET. If you leave ASP.NET, the options are endless: Java, Silverlight, JQuery, Flash, etc. ad infinitum.
Silverlight and Flash are great for richer user interfaces, however I dont think they should be used for the "whole" interface or application. Its best to narrow down these parts and decide how rich these need to be, then evaluate which technology to use. If you just want to prevent full round trips to the server on a page, AJAX is a good option. I would also recommend Silverlight over Flex, since you probably/already have the tools.

Neodynamic Barcode Professional for SSRS

Our application needs to be able to render barcodes to PDF documents that will be accessible over the internet. Our technology stack includes SQL Server Reporting Services so we would like to leverage it and its ability to render to PDF; however, we are not able to get it to embed the FREE3OF9.ttf barcode font in any consistent manner.
I have reviewed this question, but would like to know any if any one has used Neodynamic products, particularly their SSRS product and whether or not they were satisfied with it. If anyone has any other solutions besides Neodynamic for rendering barcodes to a PDF via SSRS I would also like to hear those.
I haven't used SRSS before, but I have written barcode generating software. If you are looking for alternatives, writing your own is not too difficult.
You can find all of the information regarding barcode encoding online. I used Code 128, and simply created a table of values in my source code. Rendering the barcode is just a matter of drawing solid black and white bars based on the information in the table, so you don't need to worry about embedding fonts.
It looks like you want to use Reporting Services, so maybe this doesn't help. Either way, good luck with it!
I use it at work and like it, it is very easy to use and has many different bar code options. I recently created a bar code our of an image outline, it was pretty cool. The Tool is easy to use its pretty much like adding an image to the report, you choose which field to populate the bar code, choose the bar code style and boom you're done.

Resources