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End-User Designer

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answered on 22 Mar 2010, 12:24 PM

Hi Eddie Conner,

We're not sure what the MIX conference has to do with the feature you inquire. Anyway we currently don’t have a stand-alone/end user report designer. However this is in our TODO list of features and once we start working on it, the Reporting RoadMap would be updated accordingly.
However, your feedback will help us shape our decision when it comes to an end-user report designer, so we have the following questions:
How do you envision the end-user report designer to function? Do you see it desktop-based (WinForms, WPF) or web-based (ASP.NET, Silverlight)? Do you need an application which will allow your users to create reports from a predefined set of database fields (similar to the current designer in Visual Studio), or do you need an analytical application which to allow your users to analyze data (KPIs, trends, cubes, etc)? What is the expected outcome that your users will need to produce?

Sincerely yours,
Steve
the Telerik team

Do you want to have your say when we set our development plans? Do you want to know when a feature you care about is added or when a bug fixed? Explore the Telerik Public Issue Tracking system and vote to affect the priority of the items.

answered on 18 May 2010, 09:57 PM

Hello Mike, Eddie,

Thank you for your feedback and thoughts on the features you would like to see in a Telerik End-User Report Designer. Yes, we do agree that an end-user designer based on Visual Studio is a viable solution. We do have some additional ideas, although we are still to test whether business professionals/managers will feel comfortable with the Visual Studio interface and what they will think of property grids.

Please, feel free to share any additional ideas that come to mind.

Kind regards,
Vassil
the Telerik team

answered on 18 May 2010, 10:13 PM

Vassil,

To be clear, I'm not suggesting that the VS designer is suitable for business professionals/managers. My comments were not related to the design of the editor; I was responding to the relative importance of supporting editors on multiple platforms. Some additional comments that you need to focus on with respect to the design include:

1) Separation of report layout from compiled resources
2) Ability to design against an XML schema
3) Ability to reference image resources that are not compiled into the binary
4) Ability to programmatically pass all of these inputs (and data adhering to the schema) into the reporting engine to produce a report output for a specified format.

Ideally, the business professional should be able to design a report based off of an XML schema that is provided by the developer. In turn, the business professional should be able to update their layouts whenever they like (as long as they adhere to a specified schema). Rather than having to recompile any layout changes, the layout should be a template that can be readily deployed by copy this template to the installation.

Mike

answered on 20 May 2010, 01:09 AM

Yes, I concur that the design and deployment features are more advanced on DevExpress reporting, but I do like the features of the Telerik Report Viewer. Telerik has been a leader in ASP.NET and now SL controls, but they had better devote some attention to their Reporting design and deployment capabilities or they are going to lose this market. Although they finally posted something for 2010-Q2, I don't see any features addressing these concerns, and there is no longer term plan showing a vision that even competes with the DevExpress design experience.

I am currently facing a decision of possibly switching vendors, so a little better visibility into the future of this product would be helpful :-)

answered on 21 May 2010, 09:29 AM

Hello guys,

Again, thanks for the feedback.

As you know, we are very open when it comes to our plans, and we try to be transparent and not hold back anything. We simply do not have a time frame for an end-user designer, so we cannot promise anything. This feature is still with lower priority as of this time, because there are a few things we need to finish/provide in order to have the ability to offer an end-user report designer. For example, Michael proposes to offer the Ability to design against an XML schema - we need to provide a way to save our reports in XML first, and only then we can provide an end-user report designer. This task is in the works and the ability to save report definitions will be available later this year.

Best wishes,
Vassil
the Telerik team

answered on 24 May 2010, 09:39 PM

I have to agree Scott.

First of all, I like the Telerik Reporting tool but I cannot even use it yet due to my clients are wanting/requiring an end user designer. I cannot spend the time to build the reports and them hope on the end user designer to come down the road. I instead have had to abandon the Telerik reporting product at this time and use a competitor's product to be able to meet the needs of my different clients.

Again, I do like the Telerik Reporting product and features. However, in my opinion, it is not complete enough to compete with the other reporting products in the market

answered on 15 Jul 2010, 01:44 PM

Hello Eddie,

I think the last two posts from my colleague Vassil cover the end user designer topic quite thoroughly. To repeat: it is on the road, but we have to implement some other features first, which would be needed.
Vassil even elaborated on one of them and you will see others in the upcoming RoadMap soon. Once these are done, we would be able to engage with a time-frame for the end user designer feature.

All the best,
Steve
the Telerik team

Do you want to have your say when we set our development plans? Do you want to know when a feature you care about is added or when a bug fixed? Explore the Telerik Public Issue Trackig system and vote to affect the priority of the items

answered on 11 Dec 2010, 08:54 PM

Sure wish Telerik <admin> didn't hide the name of the other product. We need a web-based solution and if you don't have it, why not allow him to refer us to another vendor who does? We have the full suite from Telerik and without end-user support we are dumping the Telerik Reporting for a solution that does. If and when Telerik has a web-based solution, we shall be back.

BTW, focus on web-based only for your first release. Why? because all other technologies have the ability to host a web page (aka IFrame). Our applications are in multiple platforms, languages, and device types (Droid, iOS, Linux, Win, etc.) so if you had an HTML5 solution, all of our applications could just IFrame the report HTML server.

Happy Holidays!

Scott Peal
Global Chief Architect
Company Automation LLC

answered on 29 Mar 2011, 08:38 PM

I too am hoping for an end-user designer soon.

I'm hoping to see something simple for the end user. Most of my users do not have the time and/or patience for anything too complex (such as the report designer in VS). They just need to be able to pick which fields (from a provided list of related entities) they want on the report. Then give the report a title, some basic design structure (maybe from a list of provided templates) and focus on the complex grouping, sorting and filtering (but from a user-friendly interface). Charts and cross-tabs would also be helpful.

Right now, users are getting data from a grid in the application, then exporting that to Excel for manipulation. If they could do this within the application, then save out the resulting report, it would save them a lot of time.

answered on 01 Apr 2011, 03:41 PM

Well, Rayne, we couldn't have summarized this better. Your description of an end-user designer matched ours exactly, and this is what we will try to provide. An end-user designer based on Visual Studio simply will not cut it today. UIs and UX have improved immensely in the last few years, and we plan to take advantage of the new advances.

When will this happen? I cannot say just yet as we are still on the drawing board.

Kind regards,
Vassil
the Telerik team

answered on 05 Apr 2011, 04:41 PM

We are evaluating some reporting tools and for now, we really like the one from Telerik. But a major feature is missing and its the End-User Designer. Without this feature, we can't go with your product and we don't have much time to decide.

Is it possible, at least, to give us some news about when you could release a first draft of this feature. Every major reporting tools already have it and they are well done. I have also checked the roadmap for your reporting tool and it only say "coming soon"!

i understand that you have other priorities too but we would like to know if this feature is on a high priority or not.

thank you!

alex

answered on 07 Apr 2011, 04:13 PM

I have been waiting for years for this to happen as well. And truly getting really frustrated.

Ideally, we need an end user report designer to (at a minimum) be very data friendly and flexible like crystal. The way I can user a stored procedure and link it to a table, then link to some external data source in crystal is amazing. That piece alone is what is missing in every other report deigner I have tried. Sure, keep it simple, but just as important keep it flexible.

In our business, we have people that design, create and maintain reports externally to the compiled application. So a report format that we can keep portable (including all data sources) would be awesome. If a client needs a new invoice format, we need to be able to update it on the fly and drop that new XML file or whatever in place without hacing to recompile the app.

I hope you guys are really listening, you have an opportunity that I think you are letting slip away. If anyone knows of a reporting tool that properly handles stored procedures and allows random linking as Crystal does, please send me an email. We are desperate to even find an interim solution. My requirement, it MUST be dot net. Crystal is fine but they too are getting too splintered and are now only focusing on dashboards, etc.

Thanks!
Tim
tdemeza [@] natrisk dot com

answered on 08 Jun 2011, 07:07 PM

The telerik product roadmap as of the time of this post contains no useful information, so its kind of pointless for telerik employees to keep pointing to that link like its going to answer all of our questions. Is there any updates on the status of this feature/product request ? It looks like there are alot of folks who would like this but it seems to just get the backburner. This forum post is over a year old and still actively posted to... I think that is a strong indicator that your customers are reaching out to you with an opportunity to remove any doubt that telerik is a "Complete" reporting solution.

answered on 07 Nov 2011, 05:13 PM

Any news about this feature, yet? I have to agree with all people who posted their comments here. Telerik components really make our lives easier, but this feature is crucial to sell products using reports. Thus, I really wonder why it takes such along time to develop something like that.

Again, I really enjoy working with Telerik components, but maybe there is a different understanding of "it is on our roadmap" means. If something cannot be integrated into the product line for more than 3 years you should make this clear to your customers. Having still no release date for this feature I have to assume that we will not get it within 1 year timeframe or am I wrong?

answered on 08 Nov 2011, 03:11 PM

Dear Telerik,
I appreciate the fact that you have finally decided that this is a highly requested feature and will begin to implement. However, I have a serious problem with the fact that you are choosing Silverlight. As much as I see that silverlight is an absolutely incredible technology, every indicator is that MS is moving away from this to support HTML5. Why? Who knows... More importantly, please do not leave those of us whom need this functionality in a winforms enviornment out in the cold. Most end user report designers are created so the designer (Not the developer) that knows the data can create reports for a client which can then be easily deployed to any viewer. I think you really should consider a poll for what everyone wants.

I will reiterate my needs:
1. A stand alone report creation tool that allows easy access to many different data sources, very similar to the way it is done in crystal. I can link a Stored Procedure to a SQL Table, and then link to an excel spreadsheet if needed. All of this is done in a very simple UI and does not require a developer skills. Again, buy a copy of crystal and look at this feature. It's awesome.
2. Simple filters, groupings and parameters that the "designer" can define alone with the intended layout.
3. Simple integration of sub reports that are easily linked to the main report.
4. A way to save the report definition to a file. This report definition should contain everything needed to execute the report except for the parameters. Which the intended end user should be able easily enter and execute.
5. What ever executes the reports and displays them to the end user should be able to load these pre defined reports on the fly so that they can be updated without having to recompile the application.

6. Then once the above is done, now you can work on allowing a real end user to do minimal modifications in real time to a report that was designed by the report designer. In fact, the report designer should be able to choose, what the ultimate end user can change, edit or modify on the report. Such as filters, groupings, colors, etc.

I hope other chime in and give specifics because I really don't want to wait on another component that completely misses the mark. This is very important to me and my company. Properly implemented, this could be one of the best tools you guys could produce. Right now, it is fine, but in most organizations the reporting folks are not developers, they are data gurus. Therefore, making them use developer tools to create reports is not efficient in my opinion.

Thank you for listening.

answered on 08 Nov 2011, 09:27 PM

Just adding a +1 here. My clients have been asking for an ad-hoc reporting tool for years. We got a RadControls Premium Collection with Reporting, in part because we were considering Reporting itself as an option for users to create reports with predefined datasets. But for various reasons that didn't happen. Now our license is about to expire and we're re-evaluating the decision to go Premium, especially since there was a hint here that an end-user designer might be a separate product.

As to <admin> removing the name of another product, sure we all understand how any company feels about such a thing. However, I'd maintain that if Telerik isn't selling something then another product can't be competition. If Telerik doesn't have an offering in a specific space then please don't worry about people purchasing other products that suit our needs. We still love RadControls and will continue to use that product for the features it includes. But for the features it does not include, we don't have much choice but to look elsewhere, and making that process difficult is just downright unfriendly.

As to features, I would create a rich BAL, the tables and fields for which would be exposed in the designer. If we pre-built the designer for specific users then this could be early bound, I wouldn't mind that. But for a generic designer the BAL could be dynamic and reflection (or XML) could be used to identify the tables and fields. A configuration setting is required to expose a configuration string or other parameters so that each site could point to their local datasource. Through the BAL we would then apply this to the DAL to access the source.

As described here, anyone could really create this end-user offering. Though I think the consensus here is that the tools already exist, just built-in to the VS container. No one wants to re-invent those wheels, and we trust Telerik can do this... one of these years....

BTW, I got a server error when posting this too, but I always ctrl-C before posting anything just in case, and a simple refresh of the page showed the post. Thanks for the warning, tdemeza!

answered on 11 Nov 2011, 07:32 PM

Hi guys,

Thank you for sharing your needs once again. Your descriptions overlap with our idea for an ad-hoc report designer, which obviously has to go a little further than the "traditional" ad-hoc reporting where IT is heavily involved in the process. We will try to simplify things a bit, and make the maintenance of the reporting system easier for all involved parties.

As to using Silverlight, it was a tough choice. We chose it because of our expertise in the platform, although we've hit a few snags. I am nevertheless sure that our devs will find a way around these shortcomings.

In this regard, if you are to chose a platform right now, what would be your choice? Related to this: do you guys need a client/server solution, or do you prefer a more client-centric solution?

Regards,
Vassil Petev
the Telerik team

Q2’11 SP1 of Telerik Reporting is available for download (see what's new). Get it today.

answered on 11 Nov 2011, 08:06 PM

Hi Vassil, Take a look at DevExpress XtraReports product. It has a customizable Winforms end user designer. Report definitions may be saved in an XML flat file format and may be presented in a Winforms client or a browser. Having integrated it in to our app I'll say the API is not as intuitive as what we find in Teleriks components. But the end user capabilities are comprehensive. Like others here, we use Teleriks components in our application with great results. But unfortunately the reporting tool set is of no value to us (Lucid) without an End User Designer. Sure wish Telerik would create one that is very customizable and comprehensive.

Mark Masson
Director of Technology
Lucid Data Corporation

answered on 14 Nov 2011, 11:33 PM

I'm starting to wonder if this should be an open source project hosted at CodePlex.com. It would help if Telerik could provide the benefit of the experience they gathered in creating the VS addin. The information could be employed in the creation of whatever UI's people want. Of course Telerik controls would be used to create the new utility.

(Typing quickly and I know this sounds dis-jointed...) Off the top of my head I'm thinking there needs to be more than one UI which integrates with a generic middle-tier for rules. With this "MVC" pattern people can add UI's based on Silverlight, MVC webforms, or maybe even winforms or WP7. The UI just renders the visual look and feel of reports. The middle-tier pulls fields and other metadata from configurable datasources, again operating through a generic provider model rather than hard-coding to ADO.NET, entities, etc. I might prefer an existing BAL assembly for my data source, where someone else might want to use canned AdventureWorks resources, or something like LINQtoTwitter. A reporting application like this should be independent of the data source, but all data sources need to be able to provide what's required for the UI to define reports, through classes implementing this provider definition,.

I can picture this, just don't have any free time of my own to actually create the framework. It would be real nice if Telerik could pioneer this. If the project is based on RadControls, anyone using the code is going to need a license. Just don't host executables, or work out some other way to protect rights.

BTW, for anyone who gets an error after they post to this thread, just go back to the thread page from the error and refresh. Your post should be there despite the error.

answered on 22 Nov 2011, 11:09 PM

We also have evaluated the Telerik Reporting and also need the End User Report Designer capability. Please put this feature at the top of your road map. The lack of this feature is the only thing keeping us from going with Telerik Reporting. I went back and read all the previous posts and saw that Telerik is planning to implement an End User Report designer in the beginning of 2012. I hope this is true. We wanted to get our vote for how this should work for our needs. The application we are developing is a WPF based client application. We need for the End User Report Designer to run from within our application.

answered on 23 Nov 2011, 01:37 AM

"The lack of this feature is the only thing keeping us from going with Telerik Reporting."

Let's all remember that Telerik Reporting is a fine tool for what it does, but many of us are looking for something else instead of or in addition to what Reporting does. Yeah, I also have a client that asks "why did we buy Telerik Reporting when we still need a developer to create all of our reports?"

Telerik Reporting is for developers. Maybe Telerik Marketing didn't think far enough ahead to the idea that the only reason why developers need to create reports is that end-users don't have the ability. But there are applications where the requirements are so complex that we cannot ask end-users to satisfy their needs with an adhoc query tool. I wouldn't want an adhoc query utility to be as complex as Telerik Reporting, just with a user-friend front-end. That said, if that were available I'd be happy to have a new vehicle for revenue in helping our clients to create reports using the complex tool. There needs to be a balance between a tool that's adequate enough for most operational needs and one that's too sophisticated for average users. That's where a consumer-facing front-end needs to be differentiated from Telerik Reporting as we know it now.

We need to know when to pull specific tools from our kit. This tool shouldn't be removed from the kit, or dismissed as unusable, just used differently as soon as we can add alternatives to the kit.

answered on 20 Apr 2012, 04:39 PM

I already commented in the product forum a while back but I'll add a note here. The new reporting product seems great for most needs, and that of course should be Telerik's primary goal. What's missing is a MVC architecture where we can create our own data provider. In the modern world there are more sources of data than relational databases - we obviously use different .DataSource entities for grids and other controls. I'm hoping to see a provider model added which will allow use to link in a custom DAL which implements a Telerik-defined API. This way end-users will be able to report on any data source available. Until that happens I can't sell it without creating a near-line RDBMS depository for users to query. There are a lot of products already out there where we could have done this.

Speaking of selling and MVC, on the front-end it would be nice if VAR/developers could co-brand the UI so that it integrates with existing applications. Right now it's a completely separate "bolt-on".

So no, it doesn't suit my needs or industry of applications yet, but it's a good start.

Thanks to Telerik for being responsive!

answered on 20 Apr 2012, 07:28 PM

Here's a scenario. The report designer should allows us to link a DLL which exposes BAL that conforms to a defined API. The API might include methods like GetFields (returning names, types, constraints, etc) and GetData(params). The result set might be a standard DataSet or DataTable where columns agree with the Fields. The Fields (and related data types, etc) are used by end-users to design their reports. So they select a provider and design their report. They then run the report against the same provider.

Note that with this scenario the end-user is completely unaware of the data source. All they should really see are field names. The source might be a web service against SalesForce, a local application or CRM, SAP, Twitter, or an aggregation of multiple sources similar to that provided through SSRS. Note also that this is exactly what we do with Telerik Reporting right now using ObjectDatasources, Entities, etc. So why should our reporting capabilities now be limited as a trade off for giving end-users the power of report design?

From the report designer product page: "Displays data from any SQL database (inc. MS SQL Server, Oracle, etc.) and Microsoft Analysis Services Cubes".

OK, we can put the DAL behind a supported database, do the ETL, and let the report designer hit this replicated data source, but we shouldn't need to do that.

The bottom line here is that the data source is irrelevant - all modern development abstracts the UI from the model so why should this be any different? The hardcoded binding to relational data structures artificially and unnecessarily restricts the product to a limited audience.

Any help?

answered on 21 Apr 2012, 09:52 AM

Hello Tony,

As usual we highly appreciate your feedback and any constructive criticism. The Report Designer is still in Beta, so what you see right now is not the final product. I believe that our replies in the comments of the Telerik Report Designer blog post answer your questions, namely:

We plan to extend the datasources support and include a datasource component capable to access custom data layers that expose their data via data service.
At this time, we do not have plans to offer a Report Designer Component which can be used from within applications. The Report Designer will be a stand-alone application in the first few versions.
The Report Designer will not be brandable.

Regards,
Steve
the Telerik team

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answered on 22 Dec 2012, 04:03 PM

So all this talk in the thread about a designer that would work with either HTML5 or Silverlight and Telerik releases a stand-a-lone .EXE which is useless for a SaaS product that is web based. I really think Telerik bailed on this and took the easy way out instead of providing a real ad-hoc tool that would bolster their product.

I haven't heard of any plans to release a version of their end user reports that would be useful for web based product offerings, other than previous posts here that have apparently been abandoned. I would like to know IF there is a product release that will come within this year that will provide that functionality or should I take my renewal money for Telerik and buy another product that already offers this?

answered on 02 Jan 2013, 04:38 PM

Hi Richard,

Yes, for 2013 we plan some major improvements on the way we build and present reports in the Web and the all as HTML5 will be the main focus. As of now I cannot give you any details what and when will be available but as soon as we have any valid time frame we will make it public in the product road map.

Anyway we will highly appreciate if can share with us your plans and your expectations (you can always open a separate support ticket if you need to send us any sensible information).

Regards,
Svetoslav
the Telerik team

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