Hello!

We're thinking about creating completely custom reporting software for our baan IVc4. It will for example generate daily, weekly, monthly reports based on couple of criteria such as customer id, product id, etc.
But baan's sql server 2000 database is far from easy to understand and use to retrieve necessary data for our reports.
What would be some of the best options to get data from baan's database to our reporting software?

Thanks for your help!

You may want to check out Cyberquery's eCQ product. It provides a pretty friendly interface for developing report that uses Baan's data dictionary definitions to provide "friendly" names for the report development. Their website is http://www.cyberquery.com.

At a previous company, I also used MS Access to develop an interface that called SQL Server stored procedures. It works pretty well. Unfortunately, you do have to be familiar with the Baan data dictionary and SQL Servers TSQL language in order to write the stored procedures. Once good utility for exploring fields names in Baan is general table maintenance (session ttaad4100) or general table display (session ttaad4500). If you press "*" while you are displaying table details in either of these sessions, it will give you the actual field names rather than the "friendly" names.

I hope this gives you a few areas to explore.

Thanks,

Vince

On SQL 2k u can use reporting services with .Net framework . Though we have SQL 2k , we have not explored this option mainly becos our existing reporting strategy caters to our all requirements .

The reporting strategy we follow is
1. Where we need print outs without image , we use Baan reports extensively. For summary results, we use baan arrays extensively rather than disk based report data tranformation. This gives very fast and efficient reports.
2. Where we need report output processing (like sorting charting , filtering , printing, emailing , formatting etc ) , we get the any output in excel easily from any report or any table easily .We have built a huge respository of such excel based analyses . If u want to this excel strategy , u can download the same from sourceforge.net/baan2excel
3. Where we need image outputs , we use external programs triggered from baan to print data with images .


While there can be some improvements in this strategy also (browser based , security etc) , it works best and gives best results due to excellent native data dictionary integration.