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.
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Is there anyway to create more rounded/professional looking buttons using vba. I found a couple places that suggested using images, which is not a terrible Idea, but I was wondering if anyone had a clue if there is a downloadable software, add-in, or anything. The ones currently available make my program look like an Mid 90's application. I really appreciate the help. I mean look at it!!
Office VBA uses the Microsoft Forms Engine which is a lightweight (drawn) implementation of a GUI toolkit. Because of this the usual techniques used to customise button appearance on windows (owner-drawing/theming) don't apply and your stuck with what you've got.
If you don't want to use images you need to find an ActiveX control that does the job, something like http://www.arcadiahome.com/products/components/activex/powerbutton.htm .
first of all, please excuse my ignorance, this is an exploratory question, rather than a specific programming program that needs solving.
I have a number of clients that have unique websites, none of which I was involved in developing. I would like them to be able to display a calendar of common events, but which would also contain events unique to them.
Is it possible using something like Server Side Includes to be able to give them a few lines of code which they could insert into their website (on any particular page) which might display a calendar type display, which their users can then interact with?
I guess I am looking for something similar to a Google calendar but I do not want to use a Google calendar. The key thing would be that they would only need to insert the few lines of code on one of their webpages; they wouldn't have to install any software on their servers.
Any suggestions?
Thanks
Damien
There are are all sorts of web calendars that will allow you to include them on a web page (typically using javascript, not SSI). Some are targeted at specific platforms (ie, Wordpress) and some are more generic.
Try searching "web calendar widget" for examples.
You'd have to put some amount of content on their site. If you can do that, you can include some javascript that will load more javascript from the server side that can do the bulk of the calendaring work for you.
You wouldn't be able to just drop a few files on the server and have them work, you'd need some way to link to them by changing the existing content on at least one of the pages.
I may be misunderstanding your question though.
If you are looking for specific recommendations on web calendar widgets, Arshaw's fullcalendar is my favorite to date.
It displays a great calendar that can be easily styled with css or jquery ui themeroller and is very programmable. The website has great documentation and examples as well.
Per using it on different sites, it supports that easily.
Note, I'm not affiliated with that calendar at all, just a satisfied customer.
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...
I need to put together a team to build a silverlight based application that will read an xml file and generate a Mind Map diagram based on that file.
I am new to silverlight and I need to find out what skills do I need and how difficult is it to do something like this.
I expect the typical Mind Map features available in a commercial Mind Map software, like the ability to open and collapse nodes and to move the nodes around the screen.
There is a pretty well known Silverlight implementation here: http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/SilverlightMindMap
Might get you on your way to assess what is required.
i have played around with dynamic data website. is there something similar for winforms.
if there isn't anything out there for doing the same with winforms than the question would be why not? we have a massive ERP application that we want to migrate from AS400 to .Net
Winform application. my initial thoughts were to have all the maintenances be as simple as Dynamic Data Website project.
I would think that WPF would be a better starting point then WinForms, as it has support for style to say how item of data are displayed.
Dynamic Data makes it easy to edit your DB on the web. For desktop (and web) apps take a look at the new Microsoft LightSwitch:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/lightswitch/gg441300
LightSwitch doesn't use Windows Forms. Rather it creates a Silverlight App that can run both on the desktop and the web. Pretty cool.
Dynamic data is using the routing functionality of the MVC framework. In Windows forms we don't have this approach of fetching data with URLs from a server.
I am not sure how this model could fit into Windows forms.
I think it's pretty hard to create something like dynamic data for Windows Forms.
My biggest concern is here, once you created that Framework, how do you configure it? I mean if you want to change 1 form to be a bit different than the others :-)
I think its better to generate Forms for the various tables in the Database context, using a powerful Grid control from one of the big vendors. And then you can configure those.
Remember this is a different approach then the dynamic data one, where no code is generated before compile time
I think the reason you don't see something like this in winform applications is because it's much easier to store a HTML page inside a database and then display it on the screen formatted properly when using a web application because your browser knows how to format the HTML.
You would have to, stored in the database, know where each label and field would go on the form in some sort of co-ordinates fashion (or you could use a layout 3rd party control) but the amount of work that would take might be tedious to do properly.
The dynamic data website I worked on did not take input from the user. It only displayed different web pages to the user and allowed the admin person to easily make changes to the content. If you wanted a user to beable to save data then that would even be more complex because you have to worry about validation, required fields, etc.
If you have lots of users that need to see different information based on their access level then I would just suggest having a table in the database that tells the system whether or not they should see the field on the form. Then use a 3rd party layout panel to format the visible fields.
my 2 cents
As much as Dynamic Data looks simple and cheap enough to access a database it wouldn't work for an ERP system anyways. Business systems are more than moving data between database and the user interface, they require business rule actions when saving data and while retrieving the may require some massaging to ensure meaningful presentation of storage optimized data.
If you still like to pursue this option it would be very easy to create an application that is build on top of Entity Framework.
I'm not aware of a Dynamic-Data-alike, but (having written one before, years ago, for ASP) I don't actually think it would be that hard, particularly with WPF and its templating support.
Actually if you were really clever you could probably 'borrow' the backend from Dynamic Data, and just reimplement the UI as WPF.
Would make a fun little project actually.
Alternative answer: Use Microsoft Access. No really.
Alternative answer #2: So why not just use Dynamic Data then?