One of my clients has been suggesting features constantly for my TeamTrack Software. He is the one who really pushed for the reporting engine for the software, and told me that he would start selling it when I had a reporting engine that worked. That was a good enough reason for me to significantly improve the reporting backed to the software. One of the things that the software does is report on when a vehicle starts and stops.

This functionality is obtained from tracking units in the vehicles, and interogating the database and analysing the data returned. The normal sorts of things such as how far the journey was, and how long it took were obvious ones to add. What I had never thought of was adding a paramater for the amount of time the vehicle was stopped just before the start of this journey. When you think about this it is really useful, but it did take me a while to cotton onto this. I am sure that I could have used crystal reports to work this out, but I decided it would be easier on users who were editing reports by simply doing the calculation myself and adding it to the dataset sent to the reporting engine. I guess it took about 30 minutes to add this feature, and it looks to be working well.

The other feature I added was to be able to use OziExplorer Waypoints in reports. OziExplorer manages waypoints in a text file with an optional range that they are useful for. I have added the ability to automatically use these text files too. Rather cool even if I say so myself…