Reports - use Crystal or ActiveReports?

[John Heaser]

Some years ago I wrote an application for a client in VB 5 and Crystal.
The application has since been deployed by my client to many hundreds of
his customers.

Most of my work since then has been in Access but I now have to do major
new version of the application and I am learning the MSDN version of
vb.net and Crystal.

I found Crystal hard work compared to Access when I used it before - has
it got any better or should I look at Active Reports? AR seems to get
good revues on Component Source.

Please keep in mind that I have no control over the target PCs (W98, ME,
2000, XP) and don't want to clobber any applications that are already
installed. Any other suggestions will be gratefully received.

Thanks

 

[Richard L Rosenheim]

Personally, I would recommend ActiveReports. I used the version of Crystal
Reports that was bundled with Visual Studio and was burned. First, I
encountered, and reported several bugs, but Crystal never released a fix (at
least not for the bundled version). Also, when I upgraded the application
from VS2002 to VS2003, Crystal Reports stopped working on a client machine,
and was never able to resolve the issue. I converted the application over
to ActiveReports and everything went smoothly. It worked on the client
machine, and didn't have the bugs.

My two cents -- your mileage may vary,

Richard Rosenheim

 

[thomas wenning]

Some years ago I wrote an application for a client in VB 5 and Crystal.
The application has since been deployed by my client to many hundreds of
his customers.

Most of my work since then has been in Access but I now have to do major
new version of the application and I am learning the MSDN version of
vb.net and Crystal.

I found Crystal hard work compared to Access when I used it before - has
it got any better or should I look at Active Reports? AR seems to get
good revues on Component Source.

Please keep in mind that I have no control over the target PCs (W98, ME,
2000, XP) and don't want to clobber any applications that are already
installed. Any other suggestions will be gratefully received.

Thanks

Hi John,

cr.net is a great tool. But you must download the correct merge moduls and
hotfixes.
For information read this:
http://support.businessobjects.com/communityCS/TechnicalPapers/rtm_reportingoffadonetdatasets.pdf
http://support.businessobjects.com/communityCS/TechnicalPapers/crnet_deployment.pdf

Mergemoduls:
http://support.crystaldecisions.com/communityCS/FilesAndUpdates/cr_net_2003_mergemodules_en.zip.asp

Tutorial and examples:
http://support.businessobjects.com/...pdates/cr_net_sdk_tutorial_samples_en.zip.asp
http://support.businessobjects.com/communityCS/TechnicalPapers/cr_net_sdk_additional_en.zip.asp
http://www.c-sharpcorner.com/Code/2003/Sept/CrystalReportsIntroduction.asp
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/msdnmag/issues/02/05/Crystal/toc.asp
http://www.wizkil-webs.net/NET/DotNet_CrystalRpt_Samples.htm
http://www.businessobjects.com/prod...p/html/crtsktutorialscrvselectionformulas.htm
http://support.crystaldecisions.com/communityCS/TechnicalPapers/apps_vbnet.pdf.asp
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/crystlmn/html/crsamsamples.asp
http://www.codeproject.com/csharp/ReportFramework.asp

I do all my projects with cr.net.

Greeting

Thomas