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.