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| Actuate General View |
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Actuate Corporation was founded in 1993 and has its headquarters at South San Francisco, CA in the United States. It is publicly traded under the ticker symbol ACTU and employs about
535 employees. The Actuate Corporation is reported to have an annual sales volume of $107300000 and focuses on the services companies and com services such as advertising, recruiting, and e-tailers of Financial Services.
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About
Actuate? |
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Actuate
offers an 'Enterprise Reporting Solution'. It is used to generate
e-Reports. This can be used to generate reports by reading data from RDBMS like Oracle, MS SQL Server, DB2, etc and from flat files also. It is having native drivers to almost all RDBMS and can connect with ODBC also. Actuate is platform
independent. It can use NT Server and Unix server for reporting purpose.
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Why
Actuate? |
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The main advantages are it is easy to use, and its programmability. Actuate reports can be viewed from Actuate End User Desktop. With the help of Actuate Web Agent, the reports can be viewed from any web client also. This doesn’t require any ActiveX to be installed in the
system. When it comes to programmability, Actuate uses Visual Basic. All the basic language functionality of Visual Basic 3.0 is available in Actuate. So the learning curve of the programmers is too less. The next advantage in a
programmer's view is that it is highly Object Oriented. One can make objects and reuse the objects in Actuate. Reusability makes the
report design faster as one can make commonly used components and standardize the reports with company logo etc. By doing so change in a single point will make changes in all the reports.
To make a simple report, it is not needed to write codes, it can be made only
by dragging and dropping. Security is the next big advantage of Actuate. Administrator can fix security of each report by using Actuate Administrative Desktop.
Centralized Report management is possible by Actuate Administrative Desktop.
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How does it work?
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Basically Actuate uses the following
components to work:
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Actuate Report Server.
This is the actuate component which stores and generates the reports on
the server. This part is also responsible for maintaining the report
Encyclopedia and we can even print from these objects. |
Actuate
Developer Work Bench.
Using this part of the Actuate, we can develop reports and libraries. |
Actuate End User Desktop.
This is the actuate component to view, print and generate reports from
existing report documents. |
Actuate
Administrative Desktop.
This component is responsible for maintaining security and to manage
report servers. |
Actuate
Web Agents.
Web agent is the actuate component for publishing reports to the
internet or to the intranet. |
Actuate
LRX for Web Browsers.
Using this component we can download report objects for offline use. |
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File
types (Design
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Design
File ROD: |
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Every kind of Design information is stored in this file. This can produce a functional report. This is the file primarily saved when you make a new design.
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Library File ROL: |
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This
file holds information about the library. All the components are derived
from the libraries. The basic components are derived from AFC.ROL. We
can make new objects derived from AFC and store in a different file and
include it in a project.
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Source File BAS:
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This
is the Source code file. We can have a BAS to store the functions and
reuse them in the Designs.
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Compiling
and viewing
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Executable
ROX: |
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This file holds the information for report
generation and viewing.
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Parameter
Values File ROV: |
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This file holds the information about the
parameter values required to generate the
instance of the report.
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Instance
File ROI: |
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This is a file that is machine independent. This
file holds the details about the objects and this is a compressed file.
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