Third Party Report Writer Tools required

[Zoltan_Gyimesi]

Hi List / Forum,

As you very well know, the OneWorld Enterprise Report Writer tool is not really a Report Writer tool but an efficient tool to create data manipulation batch application. ERW can cause hard headache and nightmare to the security administrators when need arise at a company to enable for more employee to create their own report. How to do this and prevent the database from changes and hide the secured data at same time but enabling to create reports.

Does anybody know any solution for ERW? I do not believe it really but if somebody knows, please, share with us!

I know, there are several third party report writer tools, which can solve this issue. I also know, this had been discussed here several times, but I do't have any good idea how to search for it in the archives (and I haven't too much time too[szomorú]

Please, help me! What are these products?
I also would be happy to get links to the home pages of the products and/or manufaturers.

I also would be happy if some of you will share with me the benefits, advantages, disadvantages of this products and your experiences and opinion about these products.

All of your answers will be highly appreciated!

Thanks in advance!

Zoltán

 

[donrsimpson]

I have use MS Access and Crystal Report Writer with some success. Both provide an easy front end to create reports from any database. If your OneWorld user security is set up at the field level you can authenticate any user trying to access data with any reporting tool. It will only show them the files/fields/records that are available for that user profile.


Don R. Simpson
Managing Director, SSC
Stratagem Systems Consulting, Inc. - A Division of Capital Alliance Holdings, LLC
3333 Warrenville Rd.
Suite 200 # 73
Lisle, IL 60532
Phone: (630) 961-5662
Fax: (630) 961-5644
Email: [email protected]
Web: www.Stratagem.US
* SSC is NOT affiliated nor claims any affiliation whatsoever with J.D.Edwards® & Company. Contents of this correspondence are neither endorsed nor approved by J.D. Edwards®.




Don R. Simpson
Stratagem Systems Consulting, Inc. (SSC)Naperville, IL 60565, (630) 961-5662
www.stratagem.us, [email protected]

 

[Christian Audet]

Zoltan,

About security :

If you end up by using ERW instead of any other tools to do report then what we did here at my actual client is to setup all security for sensitive data in SQL instead of OneWorld. This way if a user try to do a fetch on F060116 for example OneWorld will return saying "Data base not in data source". It's not solving all your problem but here we combine SQL security with OneWorld Security and we are OK.

Christian

 

[Zoltan_Gyimesi]

Hi Don and Christian,

First of all, thanks for your replies.

The main issue is not only to hide sensitive information but to prevent the OW database from the possible Inserts/Deletes/Updates.

I know, OW row and column security works only when you access the data from OW and/or through JDEBASE API layer.
I also know, SQL security can solve some of the previous problem.

So, I am waiting on to know more about third party reporting tools.
Hope, somebody will provide some more information.

Regards,

Zoltán

 

[jolly]

Hi Zoltan,

What about Crystal Reports with jdeDirect as the ODBC interface?

Cheers,
JohnO

 

[khoho]

We use ShowCase Report Writer as our reporting tool. We have been using it for a couple of years against other databases and are just getting into using it for OW. We also have their ESSBASE product for multi-dimensional reporting, which we are beginning to use against OW also. I believe it has the ability to lock down by field though we are not yet using it. We have found it a very user friendly tool and with about an hour of initial training users seem to become self-sufficient very quickly. If this is of interest let me know and I can put you in contact with our ShowCase administrator to answer some questions.

 

[Larry_Jones]

Zoltan,

Search the forums for keyword ODA which is an abbreviation for Open Data Access. This is a JDE supplied ODBC driver which uses the JDEbase API (or a reasonable imitation of it) on the server side.
What it does is use Descriptive Names for the Tables and Fields (much more friendly for users) and theoretically honors all Row/Column Security settings. Since its an ODBC driver you can use most front-end reporting tools for relational databases to report against it. Thats the good news.

The bad news, and the reason we don't use it, is that it carries the same baggage/limitations that RDA programs have in that:
1. its slow compared to going directly against the underlying database.
2. it doesn't seem to be able to handle complex joins of many tables very well
3. I don't believe you can use server-based grouping and summing functions as you could if you were reporting directly against the database.

We have had great success using Crystal Reports. Search using "Crystal" for previous posts by me under this subject.

Cheers!