Reporting Technologies

[Luiz Guilherme]

Dear friends,

I would like to know what you are using to generate reports on your WinForms
and Asp.net (web) applications. Crystal? Microsoft Reporting? 3rd party?

I am still lost on this part and I would like to have a better idea to
choose in which technology I will spend time studying.

Thanks!

 

[sloan]

Regardless of what you pick... You need to think of the Report Mechanism as
a "Presentation Layer".

Crystal Reports (CR) as an example lets you code up reports straight against
the database.
Via select statements or stored procedures.
DO NOT DO THIS.
Why? Because you marry yourself to CR at that point.

A better idea is to create a strong dataset. Do all the filtering,
figuring, whatever, to populate that dataset.
And give that dataset to CR to present.
Don't put any hidden filters, or whatnot inside the CR report.

Ok, fast forward.

You figure out you don't like CR, and you want to go to Active Reports or
Microsoft Reporting.

Since you didn't marry yourself to a bunch of hidden CR stuff, you can
switch out, and all your work for generating the data is in tact.

Thus the CR, AR, MSReporting.... is just a presentation layer. Based on
your strong dataset.

See:
http://support.businessobjects.com/communityCS/TechnicalPapers/rtm_reportingoffadonetdatasets.pdf
or maybe even
http://scottonwriting.net/sowblog/posts/2148.aspx





BTW: Active Reports is another option.

Personally, I don't like CR. I find it screws you some way or another down
the road.

 

[PS]

Dear friends,

I would like to know what you are using to generate reports on your
WinForms and Asp.net (web) applications. Crystal? Microsoft Reporting? 3rd
party?

I am still lost on this part and I would like to have a better idea to
choose in which technology I will spend time studying.

In addition to what sloan mentioned you can also consider outputting
directly to file formats like PDF or XPS.

PS