Our organization, Snizyx Software, is committed to providing innovative products of high caliber.  Snizyx, in addition to its planned commercial software releases, has been a benevolent supporter of the gaming community.  In particular, we have spent much time working on community-based tools, add-ons, and additional content for various games.  One of the more recent projects we undertook was a reporting system for the racing game TrackMania United by French developer Nadeo. In this project we had to connect a dedicated server to a database, which contents then had to be visualized into a series of reports about the players, tracks, and trends on the server. It was certainly challenging from beginning to end, and without the superb help of Telerik Reporting we would not have been able to complete this task.

There were a few major anticipated roadblocks during our development of this solution, to all of which Telerik Reporting gracefully catered.  Firstly there was the complex issue of platform interoperability.  The database we had to gather information from was a My SQL database.  We believed that making such data connections for our reports would be out of the question. However, Telerik Reporting proved completely the opposite!  After filling in a few fields and following a brilliant wizard, the entire My SQL database was at our fingertips right inside Visual Studio.  We know from experience that no other reporting solution has this kind of power interwoven with such a user-friendly design.  Telerik Reporting flipped around what looked like a tricky platform interoperability issue into a quick series of steps, almost like it was anticipating our needs before we had them!

After retrieving the necessary data we had to find a way to display it all so that the average user could understand our presentation and our technical users would be impressed by the design.  It was in finding that perfect medium between simplicity and elegance that Telerik Reporting exceeded the most.  One example in our solution is the player demographic report.  With Telerik Reporting we were quickly and easily able to construct a gorgeous pie chart which perfectly showed every country the various players on the server belonged to. The chart formatting features the Chart control offered were all in one place and were all easy to understand and take full advantage of.  These formatting abilities for Telerik Reporting’s chart were certainly most helpful in our design dilemma.  However, we also wanted a custom legend that did not just show the three-letter country codes but actually listed the full country names based on what values were in the chart.  Because of the Reporting architecture and the TextBox’s support for custom static methods as values, we were able to accomplish just what we needed in just a few lines of code.  With so much being handled by Reporting our team immediately noticed our own amounts of code getting smaller.  Our decrease in time spent coding allowed more time to be productive, making the whole development cycle faster and more streamlined all thanks to Telerik Reporting.

The third major hurdle our developers faced was the problem of publishing reports.  Most report systems have some strict, expensive, or cumbersome way to deliver reports to end users.  Telerik Reporting, on the other hand, gave us a real shock when it came to report distribution time.  With the WinForms and WebForms Report Viewer controls, there was no need for extra plug-ins or unnecessary software.  Telerik gave us what every reporting team needs: the report itself, no hassle.  With Visual Studio again we just dragged-and-dropped in a Report Viewer, configured the report sources, and had live server statistics like no one has ever seen. The monumental simplicity of Telerik Reporting allowed us to finish our entire project in a mere twenty hours where without this amazing toolkit we would have been groveling in the dark for months.

Throughout the development of or reporting solution – from the odd My SQL database to a hard design requirement and the matter of publishing – Telerik Reporting had our backs.  This project showed a 90%increase in productivity versus no reporting toolset and a 64% improvement over any other reporting kit we evaluated. Telerik has absolutely secured us as a customer and already our solution which implemented Telerik Reporting impresses our end users worldwide.  Organization, simplicity, robustness, and compatibility are the first four words that come to mind when thinking of Telerik Reporting, and no other reporting product is more deserving of these words.  In fact, us at Snizyx would not even use any of these words on a number of lacking competitors.  Our reporting solution can now provide anyone with easy-to-read facts about the players, tracks, and everything in between. Many people do not associate video games with reporting solutions, but when we were met with such a challenge our team discovered Telerik Reporting which fulfilled and exceeded every expectation. The rest is a thoroughly satisfied history.