ACTIVEREPORTS

Pushing The Limits of Adhoc Reporting

Reporting Tool Comparison

Use of Subreports in ActiveReports 8

Date: 01-April-2014

Pushing the Limits of Adhoc Reporting

This whitepaper introduces the comparison of a very powerful Adhoc Reporting tool ‘Subreport’, which can be used to related data which otherwise

cannot be linked or to link more than one unrelated reports.

The assessment will be between two types of reports namely the Section Reports and Page Reports of the most recently released ActiveReports 8.

This whitepaper is about finding a conclusion about the way of using a prominent feature of ActiveReports 8 reporting tool in its Section Reports and

Page Reports – Subreports, very well-known and widely used feature to link more than one report that may or may not be directly related with each

other, or to create a side by side report or can be used to create a Master-Child report to display data in many remarkable ways.

For its effective use and quicker data calculation and thus measurement, it becomes of the vital importance to be aware of the time and memory

management of Subreport control’s rendering when it is being used in ActiveReports 8 Section Reports and ActiveReports 8 Page Reports. Being the

industrialized Adhoc reporting tool, it becomes important to deliver to the customer these tools with execution time as low as possible. These

execution times if higher can have a significant influence on the performance of the entire application.

The Problem

Optimization and performance of Report Design and Preview depends on different combination of factors that include the usage of different report

templates, controls and further usage of control API. As for ActiveReports, there can be variant feature combinations that can affect the report

rendering speed in different types of Viewer, namely, Windows Viewer, ASP.NET Viewer, Silverlight Viewer and WPF Viewer.

Subreports is one of the features that affect the report rendering speed differently in Page Report and Section Report of ActiveReports.

‘Subreports’ controls of ActiveReports is supported by Section Reports and Continuous Page Layout (CPL) of Page Report; through which a user can

embed another saved report into the report under creation; the report being embedded might or might not be related to the Parent/Master report.

For example, a user might want to categorize data based on the ‘Category Name’, and then wish to display the corresponding category description

in each group. The requirement might alter dramatically when the user’s perspective requests to show certain repetitive data in each group. This is

where a Subreport makes the scenario manageable with much ease.

The fact can be bizarre to some and as apparent to others that the rendering of Subreports in Section and Page Reports can have considerably

different rendering times and thus, can hamper the performance.

Design Time Layout of a Section Report using the Subreport Control

The design time layout of the Section Report under observation makes use of Textboxes, Picture Control and one or more Subreport Controls.

The Subreport Control is bound to another report (called also Subreport).

Design Time Layout of a CPL – Page Report using the Subreport Control

Similar to the design time layout of the Section Report, the design time layout of CPL – Page Report under observation makes use of Textboxes from

a table, Picture Control and one or more Subreport Controls.

The Subreport Control is bound to another report (called also Subreport).

Execution & End Result

The report with approximately 15, 50, 100, 200, 400, 600 and 800 pages are rendered in Windows Viewer using the Run(), and the time for the execution and rendering of report is calculated.

System Specifications The tryout is done on the machine with the configuration: Windows 8.1 + Visual Studio 2013 + 4GB RAM

The following graph depicts the time taken for the single page to get rendered in Windows Viewer, for report with different number of pages:-

From the chart illustrated above, it is evident that the time taken for rendering of report is significantly less, when ‘Subreport’ control is used in CPL – Page Report compared to the Section Report.

ActiveReports 8