Hi Doug,

The Mind's Eye Report Engine should probably be renamed now that I have included so many features into it. The Report Engine consists of an ActiveX control that can be used in VFP, Delphi, VB, etc. to programmatically generate Reports at Runtime using the Methods like ADDTEXT(), ADDSHAPE(), ADDPICTURE(), ADDPAGE(), ADDCHART(), ADDBARCODE(), SaveToJPEG(), SaveToBitmap(), CopyPageToClipboard(), etc. within the control. So, it has a visual interface with a lot of features like the ability to scale to 100,000+ percent, Print Multiple Pages per Page, Copy Report Pages to the Clipboard so they can be dropped into Word, Visio, Publisher, etc. You can also go the other way as well and drop pages or text from Word onto Report Pages interactively and programmatically as well.

You can see this on the following Screen Shot:
http://www.mindseyeinc.com/ReportEngine/MindsEyeReportEngineClipboardSupport.jpg

It also supports the ability automatically scale the print out to fit whatever page size it is printing to as well. So, there is no need to rerender a report to print it. It now also supports saving report pages to BITMAP, JPEG, METAFILE and as of yesterday I added SaveToPNG. This features has not been posted to the website yet but will be there in a couple of days if not sooner.

I also have a new SaveToWORD() Method on the ActiveX control that can save roughly 10+ Pages Per Second to a Word document using OLE Automation from the ActiveX control itself without you having to write any code. It's just a single method call. I render each page to a Metafile object and then copy them to the clipboard and paste them onto pages generated within Word. The great thing about this is that it is REALLY FAST and the text on the pages can still be edited and the pages are rendered EXACTLY as they were in the Report Preview.

Also, I refactored the VCX Engine for running VFP FRX Reports and loading them into the Report Engine and I was able to gain a speed improvement of between 3X to 6X for most reports. I had a test report from a customer that was taking 58 seconds to run on a 1.6GHz notebook and that same report is now only taking 8 seconds to produce 125 pages with a UDF call for generating almost every Detail Band Text Expression. So, I would say that was a significant improvement in performance.

The easiest way to checkout the control's capabilities is to download the BETA4 and then run the following code from the COMMAND WINDOW in VFP:

SET CLASSLIB TO MINDSEYEREPORTENGINE
o = CREATEOBJECT('MINDSEYEREPORTENGINE')
o.DEMOIT()

I have put a lot of Methods into the control to save other developers as much time as possible in their development of using the control. So, there are single Methods that can be called to Email a Report as a PDF and the same for saving a Report Page to an Image file. So, there are a lot of ways the control can be used. Some people are even using it as a presentation tool since you can automate the pages like I do in the DEMOIT() method. Speed is a big factor to me and I have worked long and hard to make the control as fast as possible without resorting to Assembler. <bg>

Licensing of the control is Royalty Free as long as you do not redistribute the control to other developers. The $695 price is per developer and there are discounts for quantities 5 and above.

If you have any questions, you can email me directly or call me as well. I'd be glad to help. I can also send you a pre-release version today that has the new SaveToWORD() Method in it before I post the next update. There are also a lot of improvements to the LINE and SHAPE stretching as well as other processing improvements for VFP reports that aren't in the BETA 4. But I can also send you the latest build for that as well.


Thanks for the suggestion Rich. I'll check out the document and see what I find.

As far as the Mind's Eye solution...I did look at the web page...but I haven't evalutated it yet. Is your solution a full-fledged reporting engine...or just something that I can use to take an already set vfp report form and create a PDF from it? Also...and I may have missed this on the web site...but what is the cost and licensing requirements?

Thanks,
...Douglas