A cut above. (DataPro Inc's ReportPro for Windows report generation software) (Software Review)(Evaluation)

One of the main reasons for writing an application is to let users organize their data into useful reports. Many new programming languages have report generators built in. Visual Objects has CA-RET, Delphi has Reportsmith, Visual FoxPro has the Report Designer, and so on. Many third-party product developers, however, are now trying to come up with reporting solutions that are easier to use than the built-in tools, which are sometimes limited versions of a full-blown product that's available separately.

Let's fly

ReportPro for Windows, Visual Objects Developers Edition was written in CA-visual Objects. Currently, Visual Objects has a built-in report generator called CA-RET. Some developers are unhappy with the way CA-RET works because it can be tedious to get your report to work with the rest of your application. If you generate a report in Visual Objects using CA-RET, you're simply creating a hook to the CARET runtime. You don't have programming access to all of the characteristics of the report you've generated, and therefore it becomes difficult to tailor the report to specific needs of the user as the application is running. This is where ReportPro shines!

DataPro Inc.'s approach is to store the report as an object rather than using a hook like CA-RET. This is done through the use of the Windows API and the Visual Objects programming language.

Key features

ReportPro for Windows lets you define reports and attach the necessary Visual Objects code to run them from within …