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What are the Vizulate Reporting install dependencies? |
IIS Installed ASP.NET Enabled .NET Framework v3.5 sp1 SQL Server 2005/2008 (Express) SQL Server Management Studio (Express) |
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What does the installed application consist of? |
There are three websites:
Plus the Scheduler which is a Windows Service |
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What are the web services for? |
The Report Service provides an interface to access reports and controls as HTML and reports as PDFs. It can also provide a list of reports available to a user and the parameters required by a report. There is also an interface to add a job to the scheduler. The Data Service provides an interface to the Data Objects within the system as .NET DataSets or XML. This allows the application to act as a data portal to external systems. |
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Does the application have to be installed to a particular location and use specific ports for its websites? |
The application installer allows the application to be installed to any file location, by default this is C:\inetpub. It is advisable not to install the application under wwwroot or other web sites due to the inheritance of settings in the web site configuration file. The Scheduler is installed into C:\Program Files\Vizulate. This is not configurable in the installer but could be changed if necessary. The default ports for the web sites are 81, 82, 83 but any available ports can be used. |
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On what operating systems can the application be installed? |
Windows Server 2003, 2008, Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7. Where available, operating systems can be either 32 or 64 bit. |
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Are there any specific operating system configuration settings required? |
Settings for IIS and the .NET framework are specified in a separate document. |
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What browsers are supported? |
Internet Explorer 7 and onwards Firefox |
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What types of data source can be accessed? |
Relational databases for which there are .NET or OLE DB drivers available e.g. SQL Server, Oracle, My SQL, Access. Excel Spread sheets Web Services REST style interfaces .NET Assemblies CSV files XML files (the format of the XML should conform to the Vizulate XML schema) |
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What report output formats are available? |
HTML Excel (data only) (XML & PPT are planned for a future release) |
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How can reports be accessed? |
HTML – via web service or web browser PDF – via web service, from the application (in a browser), email (from the scheduler) |
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What spec should the server(s) have? |
Web servers (or combined Web/database servers) should be at least: Dual Core processor 2Ghz with 4GB RAM. If the database server is separate it should be at least: Dual Core processor 2Ghz with 2GB RAM. |
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Can the application be installed on a virtual machine? |
Yes, but unless it has sufficient allocated memory and network bandwidth then there may be performance issues. The minimum will depend on the system specification and the resources allocated to other virtual machines on the system. |
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Are any components downloaded to the browser? |
No, the application is thin client only HTML and JavaScript, no ActiveX or similar components or plugins are used. |
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Can the application be load balanced? |
The application can be installed in a web farm environment. |
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What are the options for the ASP.NET session state? |
By default the application uses the ASP.NET session state service. In a load balanced environment this would need to be changed to using a SQL Server database for the session state. |
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What 3rd party components are used in the application? |
Telerik - RadControls for ASP.NET Ajax – Application’s User Interface ComponentArt Chart – Charts and Gauges Expert PDF Creator – PDF Generation Query A Dataset – SQL queries of in memory datasets. |
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How is the Vizulate database supplied? |
Typically this is supplied as a SQL Server backup file which just needs to be restored on the Client’s database server. Scripts to generate the database from scratch are also available. |
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Why does the application require a SQL Server login to the Vizulate database? |
The login the application uses to access the Vizulate database should be a SQL Server login rather than a Windows Authentication login. This is because the application does not store any user’s Windows Login details and does not interact with Active Directory. |
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What data is stored in the Vizulate Database? |
The Vizulate database only stores information related to the Vizulate application, i.e. user logon details, data source connection details and how the reports are to be created and what they are made up of. No client data is stored in this database, except where data values extracted from data sources have been overridden. |
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What is the Vizulate database collation? |
The Vizulate database by default uses the Latin1_General_CI_AS collation, which is the default collation when installing SQL Server in the UK. If a different collation is required scripts are available to build the database from scratch. |
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How is an existing install updated? |
The database upgrade wizard is run to make any database changes and update the stored procedures and user defined functions. The application should be uninstalled and the new version installed. |
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Can reports be automatically bulk printed? |
Using the Scheduler reports can be sent to a printer which has an assigned email address. |
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Are the report controls interactive? |
The controls do not directly support drill down of data, e.g. clicking on a bar chart with monthly data causing the chart to change to the selected month showing daily data. However there is a ‘click through’ mechanism whereby clicking on a control such as a chart results in navigating to another page in the report which contains information related to the selection made in the original control. |
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What data manipulation options are available? |
Data can be grouped and summarised on the fly. Options are: sum, average, standard deviation and variance. There are options to perform simple pivot - transposing the first column of data into column headers and to parse the data taking data repeated within a column and transforming it into separate columns (this is best explained with example data –see documentation). For users with the appropriate permissions there is the option to override data. Overridden data is fully audited and stored within the Vizulate Reporting database, the original source data is not modified and any changes can be restored to the original values. Controls in which data has been overridden are highlighted with a red border within the Report Editor – this highlighting does not appear on the final report output. |
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Can reports be transferred between systems e.g. moved from a pre-production system to production? |
Reports, Report Controls and Data Objects can be exported to an XML file which can then be imported to other instances of the Vizulate Reporting application. A master report database can be created so that a central repository can be used to supply updates to other systems. Items already imported from a given system when re-imported are updated rather than being created as new items. |
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Does the application support CMYK? |
The Colour Space of the generated PDF files uses RGB by default, but can be configured to use CMYK. |