Best overall reporting package?

[Paul Ritchie]

We are writing a web application for sale to clients to deploy on their own
web server.

Is there a good reference available comparing the various .NET compatible
reporting packages? Cost of deployment and overall functionality would be
the main factors.

I guess the obvious candidate would be Crystal Reports?

What do you use in your application and would you recommend it?

cheers,
Paul Ritchie.

 

[Kevin Spencer]

We had a developer at the last company I worked for who developed some
reports using the Crystal Reports tools that come with Visual Studio.Net. It
took him a month or 2 to do it. When I got the app for revisisions, I
rewrote the entire app just using the CLR and ASP.Net, and it took me about
a week.

I guess it all comes down to the question of functionality. In its' most
pure form, a report is simply a display of data. Some reporting tools, like
Crystal Reports, offer a large number of extra "bells and whistles" that are
more or less commonly used in reports. Of course, most of these can be built
by a good developer. So I guess what I'm getting at is, what functionality
do you require for your reports? Once you know that, you should be able to
better evaluate what tools you should use.

--
HTH,

Kevin Spencer
Microsoft MVP
..Net Developer
http://www.takempis.com
Neither a follower nor a lender be.

 

[Michael Pearson]

I like Active Reports.net from Data Dynamics
1. It's fully managed unlike Crystal
2. It's a LOT more cheaper than Crystal in an ASP.net envronment
3. It has it's little bugs, but they have a very responsive newsgroup to
answer questions
4. The reports are stored in an XML file format, and not a propritary
format like Crystal

I do no work for or get money from Data Dynamics, but it's a pretty nice
product that I use for my .Net development.

Michael

 

[Paul Ritchie]

Thanks Kevin and Michael,

We need:

Professionally formatted, easily maintained reports.

PDF output, and I would like programatic input, as well as generic database
access.

Columns, subreports, easily adapting to the local printer's characteristics,
XML input and output would all be nice.

The ability for a non-programmer to develop, maintain layout and deploy
reports is also important. I guess the bonus of Crystal is that's it's the
standard, so there's lots of resource available to support it.

However I like the sound of reports being stored in XML for example. It's
little gems of information like that that I would like to locate in a
comparison report somewhere.

Licensing is another biggy. We are proposing to sell a web application so
the cost per server would be a important too.

Thanks for your help guys,

cheers,
Paul.

 

[dotnetdev18]

asp.net reporting solution opinion

Hi Guys,

Here are my .02 since this seems to be a continuing problem with developing .net apps. Crystal / Logi are nice, but extremely expensive to integrate in "boxed" or SaaS products. MS SRS is obviously powerful, but pretty difficult to fully customize to seamlessly integrate the look and feel of an existing app. Active reports uses a crystal/MS style report designer and doesn't break the bank, but we had to implement a designer that a non-IT end-user could use with no problems or knowledge of the database schema at all. It had to pull from stored procedures, views and some cubes via mdx. In the end, management looked at the cost/time to develop in-house, and decided to go with this built for OEM product-- it worked pretty well for us. Maybe it will help you guys out.

http://www.izenda.com/

Cheers!