OIPI vs OIPI.net

Following the commercial release of version 9.0 we have had a few support contacts with regards to legacy OIPI reports being run under OIPI.NET.

In short, OIPI.NET is a brand new print engine with some really nice new features that is built using some .NET based components from a third party. As such, there is no guarantee that reports built using OIPI will correctly port across into OIPI.NET without some manual manipulation.

Issues that we have seen thus far include report rendering issues – basically rows appear in slightly different places on the page compared to the original OIPI versions and in some cases the right most column can be lost from the report. The rendering issues also affect report export options. For example exporting to HTML can result in a loss of grid lines and other graphics. Revelation is also currently looking into reports of memory not being freed up in some instances.

The supporting technology changed in the last 6 years or so and that is why Revelation has maintained support for the original OIPI. In addition, it should be noted that Revelation remains fully committed to the success of applications built in OpenInsight and support for them going forward. Revelation will, of course, continue to fix issues that they are able to, as they are found and reported on the bug tracker database. Just one recent example is the TEXTBOX method fix in OIPI.NET.

I therefore advise caution when upgrading an existing application that makes use of OIPI for reporting. Please check your reports and then either make adjustments to the report, rebuild the report within OIPI.NET or revert back to using the old OIPI by making a change to the CFG_OIPI record in SYSENV:

• VSPRINTER will run the old OIPI print engine.
• VSPRINTER2 will run the new OIPI.NET print engine.

My new examples application has three reports written from scratch using OIPI.NET and they run very well and look good. OIPI.NET addresses issues that some of you had reported in OIPI. For example, correctly shading polygons, enhanced Unicode support, etc. Personally, I like OIPI.NET very much.