A bit of general input please.

I’m currently investigating how we will implement reporting using DevExpress XtraReports. We are going down the XtraReports path because we use DevExpress controls and, hoperfully, just keeping our development toolset to StrataFrame and DevExpress will make life easier and XtraReports looks like giving us all we want in a report writer.

I’ve been back through the forum looking at all the ‘reporting’ posts and it seems as though using SF BO’s for reporting has been successfully implemented around the place although, I must admit, I haven’t been able to manage that trick yet. However, what I have seen so far concerns me in that getting data into a report appears to involve first getting a report’s data into the BO’s used in a report then doing a table copy to get the data from the BO’s into the report itself. I see this as being somewhat inefficient and, as our system it used by quite a few reporting users during production (average inserts of 40 or so new transactions every minute into an 11 million row transaction file) then efficiency is always front of mind. The application uses thin clients under terminal services so, in our case, there’s no advantage in storing copies of data in BO’s that are local to the user’s PC.

It seems to me that using Table Adaptors to execute stored procedures to get the data into our reports is the best way to go but I wonder if anyone would care to comment on the benefits of using SF BO’s over Table Adaptors and/or the disadvantages of Table Adaptors. Indeed, maybe my understading that report data must first populate BO's then be copied as a table into the report is off target.

Cheers, Peter