Monday, June 17, 2002 – Cogniza announces the release of UFLTimeZone for Crystal Reports. UFLTimeZone for Crystal Reports provides date and time zone conversion functions that give new options when using Crystal Reports with Remedy’s Action Request (AR) System. To understand the value of this new product, some background on Remedy is appropriate.

Background

Remedy AR System, from Peregrine Systems, stores dates in ‘Epoch date’ format. An Epoch date is the number of elapsed seconds since January 1, 1970 at Midnight Greenwich Mean Time. To provide a more human-understandable value, the Remedy ODBC driver converts this value to the familiar date and time format, using the user’s regional settings, including time zone and seasonal adjustments (e.g. Daylight Savings).

Challenges

One of the challenges for developers, however, when working with Remedy’s AR System is the one-table-per-query restriction imposed by the Remedy ODBC driver. When working with Crystal Reports and Remedy, this restriction prevents more that one table or view from being used in a report.
To address this issue when using Crystal Reports within the Remedy ODBC driver, developers use sub-reports or request that the Remedy System Administrator creating a join table in the Remedy database. These solutions, while addressing the immediate need, lead to decreased database and report performance, increased report development time and increased demands on the Remedy System Administrator’s time. Fortunately, there is another solution to these challenges!

Solution

The solution to the issue is to use a database driver, supplied by Crystal Reports or the database vendor, in conjunction with the functions provided by UFLTimeZone for Crystal Reports. Essentially, UFLTimeZone for Crystal Reports provides the Epoch date and time zone conversion functions that would have been provided by the Remedy ODBC driver.

Features

UFLTimeZone for Crystal Reports offers these features:
• Conversions between Epoch dates and Windows date times.
• Epoch date and Windows’ date time adjustments for any of the world’s 75 time zones.
• Automatic adjustments for any of the world’s seasonal variations (e.g. Daylight Savings in North America).

Benefits

The benefits to using UFLTimeZone for Crystal Reports in conjunction with a non-Remedy ODBC driver are:
• Decrease the demands on the Remedy System Administrator’s time by eliminating Remedy Join Forms
• Reduce the number of Remedy client licenses, by generating reports externally from the Remedy client
• Reduce report development time, by using the latest version of Crystal Reports, Crystal Enterprise or Seagate Info

Free Trial

To download a 30-day-trial version of UFLTimeZone for Crystal Reports, visit http://www.cogniza.com/products/ufltimezone/UFLTimeZoneW_30.exe.

About Cogniza

Founded in 1996, Cogniza is a US company, headquartered in Minneapolis, Minnesota.