My first two blogs focused on Delphi Prism and was an introduction of Crystal Reports and Business Objects Enterprise with this development environment.
Today I would like to focus on where to find resources and help in developing your reporting and BI applications. I wanted to focus specifically on Delphi, however as most of our samples and help are geared towards VB and C# I realized that this information will be useful for the entire .NET community.
If you are like me the first thing you like to look at is a sample application demonstrating what I want to do. Most of our samples are made simple to demonstrate a specific feature of our SDK. Our sample WIKI is the best place to start:
Currently the samples are broken down by category and then by VB and C# samples. I hope by the end of the week to have a Delphi section added with a few samples. A benefit to these samples is that many of them were written with re-usability in mind. Many have functions that you can copy and paste into your own code, then pass in required parameters to work.
But how do you use these samples if you are not a C# or VB developer? Easy you select the language that is as close to the language you are working in. For example if you are using C++ .NET or Delphi refer to the C# samples. In most cases the code will just need some minor syntax changes to get to work.
If you need to find more in-depth details on our SDK you can look at our developer guides and API references at:http://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/boc/sdklibrary;jsessionid=(J2EE3417400)ID1832361450DB02310003121355941767....
Here they are broken down by Java and .NET. Now in the past our developer and API references have been less then helpfull, yes I can say this as I did a short stint on the docs team, however there has been great improvements in them. We actually use these for our internal training for engineers who want to learn new technologies.
Finally where do you go if you need help? You can either create a support case, buying a single case if you don't have a support contract, or you can go to our public forums. Our developer forums actually have pretty good response rates on them.
- Business Objects Enterprise (including RAS) :
- Crystal Reports:
Please before posting on the forums read the sticky posts at the top of the forum as they give information on posting and where to search for help. Also when posting give clear and concise information with any code if applicable; and by all means feel free to answer any posts you see that you may be able to help with.
I hope this helps you get going in your .NET development. I will do my best to get my next blog published by end of week, with a step-by-step guide on creating a simple report viewer in Delphi and update on where to find the Delphi samples.
Trevor
