writing reports in CVI

[wilg]

I wrote the following in response to an NI survey.

"Please, Please, Please, do something about writing reports in CVI.  Almost every year I ask for this, but nothing changes..... Much of TEST is Pass / Fail, but you have a lot of great data collection instruments, used in a development environment, and sometimes in manufacturing debug.  In these situations, the REPORT is the thing that people see.  They don't see your instrument; they don't see your software; they see the "results" of the measurement.  But NI does not have a good way to present them.  NIReportGenerator only has hardcopy, so I have never even considered it.  So I TRY to use ActiveX Word.  This is one pain in the you-know-what.  Too many VARIANTS; Too many esoteric parameter fields with no HELP; Often it's like pulling teeth to get the project to build....   Can't you please do something about this?"

While writing this, I was wondering if anyone else has the same thought... how is everyone else presenting their data?

thanks

[menchar]

I agree completely.  Maybe we could do a petition like we did with C99 issues.

We've used ActiveX with Word and had no end of problems.  NI isn't particularly responsive to Office ActiveX issues, partly because they feel that Microsoft doesn't provide a stable interface.  

We founf starnge and weird things happening when we tried to do an extensive Word report - sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't.  We think some underlying resource was overflowing, maybe the clipboard.  We never could correlate the problem to any specific issue like Office version or OS version.  We think it may have had to do with pasting several bitmaps into the word doc.  We would frequently save, close, reopen the doc which sometimes helped but nothing was foolproof.

Our best luck with Word was to use a report template with bookmarks, and simply paste test results into a doc using the template.  This minimizes the amount of stuff ActiveX has to do.  

Bizarrely, there's a knowledge base entry by Microsoft that essentially states that Office doesn't work under ActiveX - they say they don't support "unattended" ActiveX sessions with Office since Office can hang up and no one is there to click through errors, exceptions, etc.  See  http://support.microsoft.com/kb/257757.

Menchar

[wilg]

Menchar

thanks for your agreement.  It's not just me.

I would be happy to be involved in any way to push NI toward a solution.

By the way, which WORD Object library do you use?

thanks

[menchar]

We used whatever comes with CVI 8.1.  NI occasionally updates the ActiveX interface, but they do indicate a specific version of Office (2003?) that 8.1 is intended to work with.  I have found errors in the NI source code in the past ... I think NI just doesn't feel like they want to put a lot of effort into the Office automation interface they distribute with CVI.

It would be very expensive for NI to come up with an effective report capability on their own, I would guess that they understand that there's a product inadequacy here but just don't have an effective solution that wouldn't cost a fortune to implement and support.

We did a petition to get NI to add C99 features, I can track it down, another developer did it, I didn't (but I was the first to sign it).  It was all done in a polite way, and NI did in fact respond by putting C99 enhancements into CVI 8.4 and 9.0.

Menchar

[RobertoBozzolo]

It's been a very long time since I began writing reports by using a hidden panel to represent test data and printing it, and till now I've not found a satisfactory alternative to this method.

Creating reports using Word or Excel is a pain to code and you never are confident the final application will work in every condition and on every machine the customer will install it on during time. NIReports again is not so easy to use, ir requires a lot of trials to obtain the desired result and does not offer a print preview facility, which will help the developer in creating the report and which the customer is used to have on all applications.

For these reasons I keep using the old, traditional PrintPanel with satisfactory results.

[Adri_K.]

Hi All,

I think this discussion is very enlightening and will help NI Developers to have a better understanding of how important generating reports in LabWindows/CVI is to users.

In addition to the Product Suggestion Center and the Discussion Forums, The LabWindows/CVI development team is using the Community to become more familiar with customer wants and needs. I have created a new Discussion on the LabWindows/CVI User Group Community page, and I invite you to share your ideas here so that it will gain even more visibility.

-Adri Kruger

[RobertoBozzolo]

Hi Adri, thanks for pointing this out. I have added some comments to the discussion in the community: I hope several users will contribute too.

[menchar]

I know this is an old thread, but I'll give it a shot ....

At some point I thought someone had mentioned that there is a technical report software package made by a German company, but I can't find any reference to that here on the forum.

We've tried using pdf file format, Office of all flavors, and there's always something wrong or problematic.  I just spent the better part of a day trying to get Word 2007 to render a 200 row 8 column table in under an hour.  The amount of time it takes to get Word to do what you want is unbelievable.

Any new development or ideas on this topic?

Menchar

[Daniel-E]

Hey menchar,

I'm really surprised it's taking that long to render the report--200 rows x 8 columns is not a large amount of data, and there should be a way to generate that report more quickly. Could you provide a bit more detail about what kind of data you're putting in the report, and what functions you're using to write it?

I also might suggest creating a new forum thread for the issue, just so that other community members can see that there's a new question and more easily provide suggestions for resolving the issue.

[menchar]

Don't be surprised - it's a known problem.  If you're building a table dynamically by adding rows with cell formatting, it's mind-numbingly slow, more so if the table is at the front of a document with lots of stuff after it that gets re-rendered after inserting each cell's contents

There are much faster ways to do it if you know the table contents ahead of time and let word render it all in one shot.

But I'm not concerned as much with this particular table problem (we've worked around it) but rather the general problem of Word's slow, obscure, and poorly supported Automation and wanted to see if anyone's used a better app for test report generation.  Word automation consumes huge amounts of developer time in order to do some of the simplest things.

Here's one for you:  Time yourself on how long it takes to figure out for the first time how to insert a table, add some number of rows to it, set autofit, vertically align the cell contents, and prevent the table from breaking across page boundaries.  And if you figure that all out and have any energy left, figure out how to get the table first row (column headings) to repeat when the table breaks across page boundaries