Update:
Cold­Fu­sion Report Builder: sanity-saving tips

Is it just me, or do other peo­ple find that work­ing with the Cold­Fu­sion Report Builder appli­ca­tion is a night­mare? Peo­ple rant and rave about Flash forms on blogs and forums all the time, yet I don’t see much writ­ten about the report builder.

Maybe no one’s talk­ing about it because no one is using it.

I am. I would like to say, for the record, that while I under­stand that it’s a built-in solu­tion and other report­ing solu­tions cost mega-bucks, I am sorely dis­ap­pointed with its per­fo­mance. I would say the level of bug­gi­ness exceeds most beta appli­ca­tions, and this has been released and then updated, quite some time ago.

Exhibit A (ver­i­fied mul­ti­ple times on two of my machines and the machine of a col­league):
Open a report. Close it. Open another report. Make a change and hit save. The file­name changes, mag­i­cally before you very eyes, into the file­name of the first (and now closed) doc­u­ment (and that doc­u­ment is over­writ­ten with the sec­ond doc­u­ment). Retrieve orig­i­nal doc­u­ment from backup. Rinse and repeat.

Exhibit B:
Run New Report wiz­ard. Go through painstak­ing process of build­ing query. Attempt to save report at first oppor­tu­nity. Get access vio­la­tion instead. Attempt to save as, save in a dif­fer­ent loca­tion, no dice. To add insult to injury, when attempt­ing to close, Report Builder help­fully notes that the report has changed, and would I like to save it? But then still won’t let me. I’m now forced to have a tequila and a nice lie down to pre­serve the frag­ile shards of my san­ity. It’s not like we have a deadline.

I’m not even going to start in about my dis­like for the inter­faces of Java appli­ca­tions. Or the fact that it’s slow, even on my brand-spanking new Turion note­book. Or the fact that to get my palettes back when I’m on one screen rather than two, I have to go into the reg­istry and man­u­ally set the left pixel loca­tion. Or how RDS fails if you pre­fix host­name with http:// and there’s no use­ful error mes­sages or instruc­tions to warn you of that.

So, is it just me?