ProActivity Reports
Technical Specifications
 
Your Information Technology (IT) support group may have questions about the technical inner workings of ProActivity Reports. This document should give them all of the information they need.
If they’d like more detail, please have them contact our Technical Support Group.
ProActivity Reports is a multi-user system that works over your Local Area Network. It is not Internet-based, but it does use the Internet each time you launch it to check our web site to see if there’s a newer version of the system available.
 
IMPORTANT: If you’re using anti-virus or firewall software (like Norton or McAfee), it must be configured to allow both “MySql” and ProActivity Reports full access to your computer, or the application won’t be able to connect to its database. MySql, the database, opens a communication port that it shares with ProActivity Reports to exchange data. If you would like more information regarding anti-virus issues, please click here.
 
 
System Requirements

Windows 7, Vista, XP, or Windows 98 SE
Internet Explorer 5.01 or more recent
512 Mb RAM
250 Mb disk space
1024 x 768 video resolution

Note: There’s a file permissions bug in the current version of Windows Vista that can cause problems when you first install ProActivity Reports. If you’re running Windows Vista, please contact us.
 
 
What’s Installed Where
The ProActivity Reports Installer lets you choose where to put the application and its supporting files. By default, this is the folder “C:\Program Files\Mature Solutions\ ProActivity Reports\”.
ProActivity Reports also writes log files and backup files to the folder “C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\ProActivity Reports” under Windows XP or “C:\Windows\All Users\Application Data\ProActivity Reports” under Windows 98.
The ProActivity Reports Installer installs the 1.1 version of the Microsoft .NET runtime, if it’s not already installed. The .NET runtime is system software technology from Microsoft.
 
 
Internet Activity
Each time ProActivity Reports is launched, it checks briefly with the Mature Solutions website to determine if there’s a newer version of the software available.
 
 
Network Activity
ProActivity Reports is a multi-user system. You can run it on several computers on your network simultaneously and share information about your residents and activities. The data is stored in a MySql database on the computer that you designate as the server. The client machines talk to the server using a bandwidth efficient protocol that minimizes network traffic.
By default, MySql uses port 3306 for communications. You can use the “Change Settings” utility to switch to a different port, if necessary. If you’d like to use a different port, please contact the Mature Solutions Technical Support Group for help.
During installation, and while running the “Change Settings” utility, the ProActivity Reports application (or one of its utilities) may scan your network to locate available ProActivity Reports Servers running on your network. The mechanism that is used is the same one that builds the “Network Neighborhood” list. If you cannot see a computer in the “Network Neighborhood”, ProActivity Reports is not going to find it either.
 
 
Registry Entries
On Windows XP machines, ProActivity Reports runs two services, and it uses standard registry entries for these services.
1. ApsServer is the name of the MySql application while running as a service.
2. ApsService is a small service that wakes up each night at 2:10 AM to make a backup of the MySql database.
Both of these services are set up to start automatically when the computer restarts. The service parameters are contained in the two standard registry settings:
     HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\ApsServer
     HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\ApsService
Windows 98 and Window ME do not support services. To work around this limitation, we create entries in the Run registry setting that launches the MySql database application and a backup utility:
     HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run