Is Crystal Reports Used Much?

[needin4mation]

Do folks use Crystal Reports with ASP.NET much or do most people use
CSS or something else for hardcopy printed reports from an ASP.NET
page? Thanks.

 

[Mark]

A good alternative is ActiveReports from Data Dynamics:

http://www.datadynamics.com/

-HTH

 

[Guest]

Reporting Services is also a good alternative. I've used Crystal (mainly in
Windows Forms) and I've got to say it seems fragile. When it works, it works
great, but when it doesn't it gives you no help or feedback whatsoever! The
"help" is pretty vague too.

My advise would be to chose something other than Crystal ...

Matt

 

[Mark]

<< My advise would be to chose something other than Crystal >>

Agreed. Have you noticed that the only people who do recommend Crystal tend
to be only those who have never tried an alternative? Funny how that works.

-FWIW

 

[needin4mation]

Is Crystal Required to be install on the server? Right now I have it
from my Visual Studio .net 2003 installation on my workstation using it
with localhost.

 

[needin4mation]

Why not just CSS? Is that bad? In my environment I am guaranteed of
the browser kind and level.

 

[Guest]

Hi,

Making your own custom "reports" is fine, it all depends on your scenario to
what you would want to do. Reporting tools have certain benefits such as
allowing non-developers to have a hand in creating reports that can be pretty
custom to them. The tools can also help with the output of a report, such as
to pdf or to the printer.

But if you don't need functionality like this, then it may be overkill.
Creating a printable version of your Web page can often be the best approach,
which can easily outputed to Word to keep the customer happy.

Hope that helps.

Matt

 

[Lucas Tam]

<< My advise would be to chose something other than Crystal >>

Agreed. Have you noticed that the only people who do recommend Crystal
tend to be only those who have never tried an alternative? Funny how
that works.

Well, Crystal is good enough for most reports - and managers 'like' crystal
since it's a known name for them.

Once you setup a framework for crystal... you don't usually get any errors.

 

[Lucas Tam]

(e-mail address removed) wrote in @g14g2000cwa.googlegroups.com:

Why not just CSS? Is that bad? In my environment I am guaranteed of
the browser kind and level.

It's a lot of work getting your CSS to display reports ... reporting tools
generate all the CSS for you : )