A Review of PDF-eXPLODE

  • Comments posted here are about the content posted at http://www.sqlservercentral.com/columnists/kKellenberger/2850.asp

    Aunt Kathi Data Platform MVP
    Author of Expert T-SQL Window Functions
    Simple-Talk Editor

  • Hmmm... Not entirely clear on the email address, are you saying, for example, that you can run a report with outstanding invoices for (i.e.) 200 customers and insert their email address from your database into the report - giving you 200 invoices on 200 pages with an individual email address on each page?

    If this is the case then fair enough, could be a useful product, if you can't do that then the email interface looks a little clunky....

    Of course until it's tested with 200 invoices I wouldn't trust it not to fall over - documents and memory managment have never been the best of friends.....

     

  • Bursting is pretty common to advanced reporting systems (Cognos, Crystal), this seems interesting to move that to a more loosely coupled design.

  • Hello

    I am the developer of PDF-eXPLODE in Australia. I was very surprised to find out recently that Kathi (who I was supporting along with the US Distributor while she was evaluating the product) was indeed a reviewer for SQLServercentral.

    To answer your question:

    "are you saying, for example, that you can run a report with outstanding invoices for (i.e.) 200 customers and insert their email address from your database into the report - giving you 200 invoices on 200 pages with an individual email address on each page? "

    YES YES. Here is an extract from a Client who processed 3500 MS Access report pages - Yes you need upto 2 GB memory for this type of extensive run and YES it took a few business hours on one day, but please read on... 

    ----------------------------------------------------------------------

    fx

    BRIDGE®

    TECHNOLOGIES

    Mark Fonseca                                                   

    3000AD Systems Pty LTD

    10 Paul Ave

    St Ives NSW 2075

    Australia

    Dear Mark,

    Please accept this letter of recommendation for your product PDF-eXPLODE. fxBridge Technologies creates a comprehensive dealing platform for Forex & CFD options and spot trading. In supporting our clients, we create thousands of statements for their customer accounts.

    When we decided to archive each statement as an individual file, we were facing thousands of dollars in potential programming effort. By using your software, we were able to eliminate having to tie up valuable programmer resources. One person from our administrative staff was able to get the job done in one day. We consider the savings from using your software far exceeding the price.

    Thank you again for your product.

    Sincerely,

    James N. Friedman

    Director of Marketing

    ----------------------------------------------------------------------

    Business Objects have done a Case Study of PDF-eXPLODE in use at one Client site and you can read that here: diamond.businessobjects.com/system/files/cr_case_study_pdf_explode.pdf 

    Please feel free to view more FAQs that add to the Help files by clicking here:

    http://www.pdf-explode.net/question.html 

    Thank you

    Mark Fonseca

    3000AD SYSTEMS, AUSTRALIA

  • Hi Kathi\Mark,

    I have numerous SSIS packages that loop through a distribution list populating Excel reports and sending each file directly to clients. Would it be possible to use this product to convert the Excel file into a PDF and then send this file to the client within the SSIS package? Or do you know if there is another way of doing this using SSIS?

    Thanks in advance.

    Liam

  • Liam,

    You should probably contact the company directly. I think the question would be can this product be run from a command line so that it can be automated. It has been a while since I reviewed it, so I am not sure.

    Kathi

    Aunt Kathi Data Platform MVP
    Author of Expert T-SQL Window Functions
    Simple-Talk Editor

  • Hi,

    I found a program which is doing report bursting and it delivers the bursted documents through email and/or ftp. The tool is called DocumentBurster (www.pdfburst.com) and it is free for using. It can burst reports generated with any popular report generator like Bussiness Objets or JasperReports and it can be used on Windows and Unix systems.

    Thank you,

    Virgil

  • Hi Liam,

    I have a client (prestigious Venture Capital firm) using PDF-eXPLODE to send Excel-based portfolio valuation reports. Each worksheet (tab) contains a different portfolio destined for a different client. I inserted another worksheet to list the tab names and decode them to one or more e-mail addresses to send each report to. I also compute the pdf file names based on the month/year of the reports, and whether or not to send the report to e-mail or only to store the pdf archive. PDF-eXPLODE has lots of options so we were able to customize it to the client's needs.

    Rob H.

  • Hi all,

    Thanks for the replies but I don't think that is quite what I am looking for. I want to convert the Excel file into a PDF within the SSIS package and then email the PDF using SSIS. Kathi's suggestion would work but looking at their FAQs this is not what this product does.

    I'll carry on looking.

    Cheers,

    L

  • Hello,

    It is very easy to call DocumentBurster from command line in order to automate the process from other scripts. This is how it was designed. Give it a try.

    Thank you,

    Virgil

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