Press Releases - 2001

Powerful Printing for Notes and Domino with IntelliPRINTPLUS 3.5.1

Group Computing Magazine, August 2001, Pg. 19
Article ID: 701
Department: Test Drive
Related Topics: Products
More articles by Steve Kern
Printer Friendly Version

As a Notes and Domino developer, I've tried more printing solutions than I care to remember. Out of the box, all you ever get are views, and a view just doesn't cut it for that presentation before the board of directors or your department head. Views are great graphical representations of data - on screen. But even when you use the printer settings, you generally can't get the results you need. In a view, totals appear at the top of a category, and not the bottom, as you would typically expect in a report. Views have many other shortcomings - too many to list in this article.

Those of you who were around before R5 may remember how much trouble it was to print a calendar. I can't tell you how many times I've been asked, as both an administrator and a developer, to print a calendar in a calendar format. Often, the requests come from the administrative assistants of department heads, CIOs, and CEOs. Telling them that you can't print a calendar in a calendar format doesn't make you very popular! Lotus introduced a solution of sorts for R4.6 that consisted of a database that let you print your calendar and other calendars to which you had access. Although it worked, it was clumsy, and in my experience, people didn't like to use it. Of course, calendar printing has been resolved in R5.

If you've been developing Notes and Domino solutions, you know this is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to printing problems with Notes. IntelliPRINTPLUS goes a long way toward resolving many problems with which you may be all too familiar. IntelliPRINTPLUS won the Lotus Beacon Award for Best Tool/Utility at Lotusphere 2000.

Product Overview
Unlike other reporting solutions, such as Crystal Reports, IntelliPRINTPLUS is designed specifically for Lotus Notes and Domino and deals with Notes data in its native format. You can even present the contents of a Rich Text field, including the contents of file attachments. I've tried many solutions, including Crystal Reports, Lotus Notes Reporter, and Lotus Approach. None has been particularly satisfying, and all have their quirks. Though I haven't worked as extensively with IntelliPRINTPLUS as I have with these three other tools, IntelliPRINTPLUS already shows much more promise than they do.

IntelliPRINTPLUS is both a reporting tool and a printing tool. It can be client-based or server-based (IntelliPRINTPLUS for Domino). If you run it on the server, your clients can use browser plug-ins to view reports, or you can set IntelliPRINTPLUS to create and present Adobe Acrobat files (.PDFs). The product suite includes the following reporting capabilities:

- labels
- envelopes
- documents
- reports
- custom (banded)
- crosstab
- view (columnar)
- form (tabular)

IntelliPRINTPLUS can direct output to the printer, export output to a variety of formats, or e-mail output as .TIF or .PDF file attachments.

There are two IntelliPRINT products: IntelliPRINTPLUS and IntelliPRINTPLUS for Domino. The original base product, IntelliPRINT, created labels, envelopes, documents, barcodes, graphics, and mail merges. IntelliPRINTPLUS has all of these functions plus additional printing and reporting capabilities (e.g., calendars, reports), and it requires less knowledge of LotusScript. IntelliPRINTPLUS for Domino supports Web clients and uses the same dynamic link libraries (.DLLS) that IntelliPRINTPLUS uses. You can use a browser plug-in or the Npip.DLL to view reports, or you can send output to .PDFs (in which case, the browser will require the Adobe Acrobat plug-in).

IntelliPRINTPLUS output is aimed for anyone's use, but it takes a "power user" to create and maintain reports. Sophisticated reports can include code based on the formula language, LotusScript, and IntelliPRINTPLUS's own Expression Builder. IntelliPRINTPLUS can be called from buttons within a Domino database application.

Installing IntelliPRINTPLUS
You can download an evaluation copy of IntelliPRINTPLUS from www.intelliprintplus.com. Cybernet Software Systems distributes its software primarily via Internet downloads, so the only difference between the evaluation copy and a full version (either downloaded or delivered on a CD) is the "Evaluation" stamp you'll see.

Installation is nonstandard in that it doesn't use InstallShield. Instead, it's delivered in a Domino database titled IntelliPRINTPLUS Setup (IPPlus351Setup.NSF). Launching the Setup database loads the Startup Navigator, which has buttons that let you both install and uninstall the product. A Help button is available that launches the About document, which describes the required specifications to install IntelliPRINTPLUS. It also describes manual installation, which entails detaching the .DLLs and executable files and adding an entry to the AddInMenus line in Notes.INI. Additional help is available in the Setup database's Using document. I've seen similar installation setups used for Notes products (e.g., Team Studio); though it's nonstandard, it works quite well.

Installation itself is fully automated once you click the Install button. Executables and .DLLs are automatically detached to the Notes directory, and the AddInMenus line in Notes.INI is modified to point to IntelliPRINTPLUS. Once installation is complete, you have to restart Notes to get the IntelliPRINTPLUS for Lotus Notes menu item added to the Actions menu. Your organization's administrator should sign the Setup database and place it on a Domino server. Users can then open the database from their Notes clients and install the application.

Although I eventually installed IntelliPRINTPLUS successfully, I ran into some minor problems. I was challenged numerous times by Execution Security Alerts. Each time, the alert used a different person's name. If you follow the recommendation in the preceding paragraph, and sign the database prior to releasing it to your workforce, you'll avoid this problem.

How It Works
Now that you have a good idea of what IntelliPRINTPLUS is, let's take a look at how it works. I'll skip the easy stuff like labels and envelopes and jump right into the heart of the product - the Report Designer. I manage a group of consultants, and when we have someone "on the bench" (i.e., not generating revenue), it's useful to have a quick report when marketing the consultant to new clients. I happen to have just such a report, but I created it in a view.

Let's first create a report based on this view. This is easy; to do it from your own database, just follow these steps:
1. Open the database.
2. Choose Actions... IntelliPRINTPLUS for Lotus Notes from the menu.
3. In the IntelliPRINTPLUS for Lotus Notes dialog box, click Current Database, and then click the New button.
4. In the resulting submenu, choose Report... View (Columnar).
5. Choose the view you want to use from the list of available views.

This launches the IntelliPRINTPLUS Report Designer.

Once you have the basic report, you can make modifications. What's really cool is that IntelliPRINTPLUS brings the view formulas into the field values in the Report Designer! Unfortunately, some other properties aren't retrieved. For example, in the view in (Figure 1) I "stacked" the values of multiple fields, creating multi-valued expressions in the view column. I then used the New Line property of the column to display text plus each field's value on that line:

jcProduct := @If(cProducts != "";

" Product Experience: "

+@Implode(cProducts; ", "); "");

jcTraining := @If(cTraining != "";

"Training: "

+ @Implode(cTraining; ", "); "");

jcBio := @If(cBriefBio != "";

"Bio: " + cBriefBio; "");

@Trim(jcProduct : jcTraining :

jcBio)

I also set the view column to the maximum of nine lines and specified shrink to content. The default properties of the field in the Report Designer didn't pick up any of those settings. However, they're easy to change in the Properties box for the field. To get to the Properties box, click the Properties icon, which looks just like the Notes Properties icon - a blue square background with a yellow diamond. Choose it from the Edit menu or double-click the item in the Report Designer. (Unlike in Notes and many other applications, Properties isn't available from the right-click menu. Considering the power you unleash with IntelliPRINTPLUS, this is a relatively minor complaint.)

You can stretch the report band or fields, and you can easily click and drag fields to new locations. I decided I wanted the text directly underneath the employee name, so I clicked the report band, grabbed the bottom handle, and dragged it high enough to accommodate both fields. I then dragged the field containing the text directly under the consultant's name and used the drag handles to widen the field to fill the report width (Figure 3).

That's a little better than the view, but I wanted to take it a step further. The view column formula produces "Product Experience:" and "Bio:" in the same font and style as the text that follows. I wanted this text to appear in bold. To do this, you can choose Custom report and build the text from scratch. To make it a little easier on myself, I simply edited the existing report like so:
1. Open the database and choose IntelliPRINT for Lotus Notes from the Actions menu.
2. Highlight the report you created and click the Open button. This puts you in the IntelliPRINT Report Designer, in edit mode.
3. Choose File... Save As from the menu, and save the report under a different name.

Next, I lengthened the detail band in the Report Designer and placed static text objects for "Product Experience:" and "Bio:" underneath the "cConsultant field" as in (Figure 4). I also changed the font size and color of the consultant's name and then right-aligned the text box with the other text labels.

It's fairly easy to figure out which buttons in the Report Designer you need to complete each task. If you can't figure it out, help is available; simply rest your mouse pointer over a button, and a window displays its name. Alternatively, you can read the "Up and Running" article described in the Help section.

One of my pet peeves about reporting tools is the lack of effective alignment tools. If you've done much reporting, you know how difficult it is to snap objects to a grid in the proper alignment. IntelliPRINTPLUS Report Designer has effective, easy-to-use alignment buttons that let you easily align text with the tops, bottoms, or sides of fields.

The whole process of modifying this report was simple; it took only a few minutes. To check your progress, simply click on the Preview report button. Here's a tip: If you have many documents, you can cancel the preview. This lets you stop before all documents are previewed and still see the results of your changes. (Figure 4), shows the changes made in the Report Designer, and (Figure 5) shows the revised report.

To complete this tour of the IntelliPRINTPLUS Report Designer, I decided to e-mail the report to myself. When you e-mail a report, you can choose either .TIF or .PDF format. When I e-mailed myself the report as a .TIF, it arrived as an e-mail attachment. It was stripped of the color I added when I modified it, but it was perfectly readable.

Help!

If you need help, it's available in three locations. First, IntelliPRINTPLUS comes with a 51.7 MB file saved as a Word Rich Text Format (.RTF) document. Here's another tip: After you open this file in Word, save it as a Word document (i.e., with a .DOC extension). You'll significantly reduce its size to a much more manageable 2.3 MB.

Last, there are instructions in the Using this Database documents for the IntelliPRINT Format and the IntelliPRINTCAL databases. Unfortunately, no help is available within the IntelliPRINT Report Designer itself. Cybernet Software CEO Larry Jolly states that the Word .RTF file represents an interim solution and that help will ultimately be available as a standard Windows Help file. Because the Report Designer sits on top of the Notes workspace, database help isn't available. Opening the Word document lets you alternate between the Report Designer and the Help document. Let's look at each of these three sources of help.

The IntelliPRINTPLUS User Manual stored in the .RTF file IPPLUSHelpFile.RTF is fairly detailed and covers everything from installation to creating labels, envelopes, and banded reports. When you open the .RTF file in Word 2000, the TOC is hotlinked. You can click the page number to the right of each item, and Word will move you to the appropriate section. The document includes screen shots, which is why the .RTF file is so large.

The downside of this manual is that although it's internally linked, it isn't linked directly to the Report Designer. So no matter how much helpful information the document contains, there is no context-sensitive help. Also, the phrasing in the manual is a bit odd. For example, you'll see sentences such as, "This manual explains how to take prints from Lotus Notes" and "Start the notes and invoke IntelliPRINT in the Actions Menu in the view of a database." Nonetheless, I could understand what was written. All in all, the 58-page manual is a fairly complete introduction to IntelliPRINTPLUS.

The "Up and Running!" article covers what you need to know to create reports. It also covers the Report Designer toolbars in some depth, so it's definitely worth reading. While you're at the developer site, you can read articles or participate in the discussion forum. You can also find sample databases and utilities, such as a format manager and a browser plug-in installer.

The Using this Database documents in the IntelliPRINT Format and IntelliPRINTCAL databases are specific to those databases. Neither document is particularly detailed or lengthy, but both are adequate.

4.5 Stars!

IntelliPRINTPLUS is a powerful and relatively easy-to-use tool. In terms of its capabilities, I've shown only the tip of the iceberg here. Even if you're satisfied with the printouts that you can produce from a view, you should review IntelliPRINTPLUS. If your reporting needs are sophisticated and complex, IntelliPRINTPLUS is definitely worth your consideration. I give it 4.5 out of 5 stars.

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