Introduction
STM is a defense contractor based in Ankara, Turkey. One of its projects is a portal that merges several disparate applications into a single website where users can access a variety of information. The information could be text, images, tables, editable forms—virtually every type of information that can be presented visually. Portal users often need to print information from the applications within the portal as files, physical documents, or both.
Challenge
Unfortunately, printing from the portal was a hassle. STM’s initial solution printed each piece of information on its own page, in the same layout used within the application. This meant that a page may consist of a single, five-row table, or an image would be printed on one page and its corresponding text would be printed on another. The results were long printouts with lots of empty space and unhappy users who found the output crude and unusable.
STM needed a way to pass information, no matter how detailed, from the different elements of its portal into a consolidated format that made the data presentable.
Solution
STM trialed Bold Reports®, testing whether information could be passed from the different entities within the portal to the Bold Report Viewer, where the layout could then be modified into an easily digestible and sensibly printable report format.
The trial was a great success. Not only did the modular approach to consolidating data into a reporting interface work perfectly, but the built-in support for printing to PDF and Word formats without any extra programming saved STM from having to look elsewhere for that functionality.
Since implementing Bold Reports, STM has used its support extensively for nested and linked tables to display hierarchical information—a critical feature for military applications where accurately tracking personnel, units, and equipment is paramount.
Another key benefit of using Bold Reports has been its easy scalability. After setting up the infrastructure to put reports together, all the different types of information from the portal could be sent to the Report Viewer and customized as needed.
STM found a dependable partner in the Bold Reports technical support resources during the setup phase. The documentation provided invaluable guides to setting up Bold Reports on the front end and back end. When some minor issues arose between the Angular-based STM portal and the JavaScript-based Bold Reports library, the Bold Reports support team stepped in to help hammer out the details and get things running smoothly. The support team also resolved a conflict between the Tailwind CSS library that STM used for its application visuals and the Report Viewer toolbar.
Looking ahead, STM plans to enhance its Bold Reports configuration to create shareable, read-only links to reports that give recipients just the data they need, without extraneous context or details to filter. And if any future projects arise where exporting data or filtering data into consumable reports are essential, Bold Reports will be STM’s go-to solution.
