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?