OT: What's the deal with Crystal Reports?

[Bob Johnson]

In this NG late last week someone asked about reporting in .NET. I suggested
going with ActiveReports and to avoid Crystal Reports. A bunch of you piled
on and not only concurred that Crystal sucks - but went beyond that.

So my new question:
Do any of you actually use *and* like Crystal Reports? If so, why
specifically do you like it?
For those of you who hate it; why - specifically - does Crystal Reports have
such a problem with you folks?

Personally, I started avoiding it about 8 years ago when I was shopping for
a good report writer. At that time, Crystal had a proprietary scripting
language that I didn't want to learn, plus it was way more expensive.
Additionally I couldn't bind to arrays or other arbitrary in-memory
structures.

I haven't bothered to look at Crystal since then - beyond cruising past
their booth at conventions and seeing that they are now touting all this
"enterprise" crap related to reports. Plus their Web site is horrible -
trying to figure out what you get - specifically as a developer - is nearly
impossible.

What are some of your specific reasons for liking or disliking the product?
I want to know if I'm missing something - or even if the product might
deserve a second look.

Thanks.

 

[Michael C]

In this NG late last week someone asked about reporting in .NET. I
suggested going with ActiveReports and to avoid Crystal Reports. A bunch
of you piled on and not only concurred that Crystal sucks - but went
beyond that.

I'm not that sure about Crystal but have used AR for many years. While AR is
pretty good it's not perfect and has some really stupid bugs that take ages
to get fixed.

Michael

 

[Michael C]

I'm not that sure about Crystal but have used AR for many years. While AR
is pretty good it's not perfect and has some really stupid bugs that take
ages to get fixed.

As an example, I tried to use Active Report for printing reports with approx
30 small photos per page. Problem was it stored every image in memory and
soon peaked out the memory usage, bring the machine to a crawl. There was an
option to 'cache report to disk' but this actually *increased* memory usage!
When I emailed them they said that this feature doesn't work with images. I
told them this makes AR pretty much unusable for printing reports with a
large number of images but they didn't appear to care. Considering you'd
think the cache to disk property should specifically be for this very reason
it's amazing it doesn't work with it. To make matters worse if you run a
report that uses 300MB and then hit the Table Of Contents button, then the
memory usage doubles to 600MB every time. I'm not saying it's a bad product
but if something better existed I would switch.


Michael

 

[Bob Johnson]

So why have you not switched to Crystal Reports? Is it a vague dislike, or
have you checked it out specifically?

-"Bob"

 

[Michael C]

So why have you not switched to Crystal Reports? Is it a vague dislike, or
have you checked it out specifically?

Several reasons I guess. The main one is that I'm lazy and AR works ok if I
keep the image size down (which reduces print quality of course). Also it
would make the app inconsistant as AR is being used for all other reports.
I'd also have to purchase Crystal I presume. For one application I wrote I
just kept the page count to a minimum. So basically I haven't come to the
point where I feel I need to go to the effort and expense I guess.

Michael

 

[Nicholas Paldino [.NET/C# MVP]]

Admittedly, I am not using the latest version of Crystal Reports, but I
have been using versions 7 and 8 for about five years now and these are the
gripes I have

I find the product to be incredibly buggy. There is an inconsistency
with its actions, and a lot of thought is not placed into the workflow of a
report.

For example, say I have five disparate elements with a shared property
that I want to change. If I select the five elements and then change one
property, it actually changes all of the shared properties of the five
elements to, well, something inconsistent, not just the property I changed.

This requires me to go and change every element individually. If I have
to change more than a handful of elements, it starts to consume a huge
amount of time.

Other gripes include (but are not limited to):

- Only one level of sub reporting available.
- No options on exported reports (to PDF, Word, HTML, etc, etc).
- VERY slow with relational data. It's generally MUCH faster when
everything is in a flat table structure.
- No ability to have compounded calculations across groups.

Like I said, this is just for versions 7 and 8, and while some of these
things might have been addressed, it just never felt like a stable product
to me. So much so that when new development takes place, I am going to look
at Telerik and Active Reports first, and Crystal Reports only if there is
absolutely nothing else available that suits our needs.

 

[G.Doten]

Admittedly, I am not using the latest version of Crystal Reports, but I
have been using versions 7 and 8 for about five years now and these are the
gripes I have

I find the product to be incredibly buggy. There is an inconsistency
with its actions, and a lot of thought is not placed into the workflow of a
report.

Yes, it's the instability of the thing--especially during
development--that bugs the crap out of me.