Standards? What Standards?

There was a recent discussion about the most broken development tool on Joel on Software, and as far as I oversee it, Rational Rose won the prize. However, I have another nominee: Actuate Report Designer.

First of all, the Actuate developers decided to give a damn about User Interface standards. Just have a look at one of their property dialogs:

Besides it looks crappy: Where is the "OK" button? Not needed over at Actuate-Land. If you want to save and close you can press "Apply" and "Close", can't you? And what about canceling? Let's give it a try: Change something and hit "Close". Ups, our changes were saved! Another try, now we close the dialog using the cosy X on the top right corner. Another ups, our changes were saved again... But wait: What's about the button labeled "Default". Will it undo our changes? No, it won't. It does what it states and fills in some stupid and meaningless default value.

Let's recapitulate: We have a property dialog, where the OK button is labeled "Close" and the Cancel button has been ommited, making the Apply button completly unnecessary. The order of the buttons is totally mixed up, compared with nearly any other property dialog on this planet. Oh, and there are no hot keys implemented, if anyone should have wondered. What a bright piece of software, up to now.

Further, they decided to use a widget similar to the property grid Visual Studio uses. But of course they did it their own, special way. If you place the cursor into one of the data cells and press the tabulator key, what would you expect to happen? Move on to the next row? Wrong! You tab onto the "Default" button. Which surely makes sense, because the most likely thing you want to do right after changing a value is to revert it back to its default state.

Well, what you actually deeply desire is to revert your computer into a pre-Actuate default state.

Noticed this little checkbox right at the bottom, saying "Parameter". What it might do? Let's give it a click:

Jeez, a modal window invoked by a checkbox! Well, that is some really common thing for a checkbox to do. Close the dialog and the checkbox is unchecked again. Of course you cannot invoke this dialog by simply double clicking on the according property.

The rest of this application isn't better. Within 30 minutes trying to add a query like "Select Count(*), Sum(Field) From Table Where otherField is not Null", I was totally annoyed.

They have their own Access-alike-but-unfortunately-just-crap visual SQL designing tool. I tried to enter the Sum() function, and chose the according column. Unfortunately, you cannot switch a field into a function. Ooooookaaaay... Then let's remove it. You know what happens next? Hmm? You're right: It is indeed completly impossible to remove a field once it is choosen. And of course the SQL cannot be changed manually, what else do we have a visual designer for?

Another 15 minutes and I figured out how to switch off visual designer, and how to enter SQL by hand. Finally. You can do this only from within visual designer itself. But wonder: The DB tree browser to look up tables and column names now is not available. You want that? Take visual designer.

So I did my query in TOAD, copied it, and executed it. Bang! Error! Semicolons not allowed here. This was the point when I stopped and started writing this rant.

By the way: Did I mention this is already version 7 of Actuate Report Designer?