Difference Desktop Reporter vs. Web Reporter

[klaus]

Hi all,
I'm looking for somebody to explain the difference between using Desktop Reporter "Open from DimensionNet" and using Reporter being started from DimensionNet. When using Desktop Reporter the "number crunching" is done on the client, it is just reading the data from DImensionNet. I'm even not sure if this takes a "shapshot" from the server or if the data are read from DimensionNet each time I run tables. When using the Web Reporter I get the same user interface as using Desktop Reporter. Again the question where is the number crunching done. I would expect this to happen on the server but I did not yet find any documentation about this. Is there somebody around who knows this for sure? Again running tables on a live survey do I get the current state of the survey when using Web Reporter? I would expect with Desktop Reporter to get the status when opening the project. Thinking further the question comes: what does it mean to save my work in an MTD file with these two variants? Will I get updated data when I reopen the MTD?

I would even appreciate to get pointed to the documentation of these details. I hope there is someone around to answer this question. Otherwise I'd try to get this information from Support and then publish it here for future use!

Cheers,
Klaus

[James Corriveau]

DR "Open from DimensionNet" and Reporter function exactly the same. All files reside on the server. And all number crunching is done on the server. Exports still occur locally (Word, Excel, PPT).

Since all processing is on the server, you will get the latest data that exists on the server at the time you click Populate.
The .mtd gets saved in the User or Shared directory on the server (in the FMROOT directory).

Best,
Jamey

[klaus]

Hi Jamey,
thanks a lot for your quick reply. Honestly I'm kind of surprised in terms of DR not doing the number crunching itself. But yes, this is good to know. Do you know a source where to read this information? As mentioned before I've not seen any documentation about that so far.

All the best!
Klaus

[James Corriveau]

Not sure why you are surprised. It's very similar to the way SPSS Base works. You can run locally or remotely depending on how you connect to the data. I think that's a great feature. If you want to run (number crunch) the data locally, just download the data from DimensionNet directly onto your machine.

Regarding documentation, I just read the DDL. But I will have to say it's pretty vague in this area.

[swinstanley]

Since reporter (the server version) came out there's been lots of web-services involved in allowing the client part of reporter to interact with the server over HTTP, so when its "open from DimensionNet" almost everthing is done over those web services. They aren't documented, which is really a big shame and I think a big oversight on SPSS's part...

The reason I say its a shame is that I think it would be great for scripts and custom apps to be able to tabulate using the server's resources over web services, given that making access to these web-services eats up a Reporter Server concurrent license I don't see it as any kind of real licensing problem either but it could solve a bunch of different deployment and data access headaches.

For instance, lets say you wanted to run a Table script vs. your server that's at a hosting center, you only can access this server over http/https and it has Reports For Surveys installed on it. You can of course download a snapshot of the data, but if there's a lot of data that could be pretty slow and very resource inefficient to do that (there's also legal reasons why you don't want people downloading raw data quite often). So people start looking at solutions to upload scripts to the server and run them via DCP there, but that's a lot of plumbing to make a few tables. Therefore the option that people go for is often to make the tables up in Reports for Surveys and populate all then export, thats fine when you wanted a UI but we all know its not always what you want.

I have visions of this:

Code: Select all

Dim tomServer
Set tomServer = CreateObject("TOM.Server")

tomServer.Connect("user1","password1")
tomServer.OpenFromProject("project1","<user_folder>\myReport.mtd")

tomServer.PopulateAll()

Dim exportHTML
Set exportHtml = CreateObject("mrHtml.Export")
exportHtml.Export( tomServer.GetExportXML() )

tomServer.Disconnect()