The Old .NET Questions Forum

.NET Reporting

.NET Developers,

What are you using for reporting? Crystal? If you're using Cyrstal, how seamless and easy is the integration? Are you using the Crystal Enterprise product? If so, how do you like it?

Stoner
Friday, June 18, 2004

From my experience w/ the Crystal 9 Enterprise .Net libraries - bug ridden and unstable in a load-balanced environment.

Now, I didn't write the code that's using the libraries, so it may be somewhat better than that - but I can't imagine by much.

Greg Hurlman
Friday, June 18, 2004

We use the CR server that comes with Visual Studio professional. CR 9, I forget the exact name.

Pluses: really nice formatting. Webpage reports look almost the same as native Crystal reports. I was really surprised at how sharp and precise the final rendering was. The built in PDF conversion is quite nice to have, esp. if your users need to print reports.

Minuses: lots of quirks, obscure settings that (IMO) are set to the wrong defaults, generally cranky to work with. Some stuff I just sorta had to keep poking with a stick until it worked, without ever feeling like I understood why.

Bottom line, I'm really happy with the way the reports look and work now that they're up and running. But I dread having to go in and make changes, because the environment is so dotty.

I should add we only have about five reports deployed this way.

Matt Conrad
Saturday, June 19, 2004

Anyone here of/use Active Reports by Data Dynamics?

Patrick
Monday, June 28, 2004

We started off with CR and then didn't like the instability of it nor the new owners. Actually we didn't like the licensing scheme they came up with. We were never able to get a straight answer from them. We switched to Active Reports and have not looked back. The biggest drawback for active reports to us is its print functionality. It requires the download of an activex component . Our clients do not allow this type of mobile code but we are able to provide printing functionality via the pdf viewer it has. We are able to pregenerate our reports so the slower speed it has does not bother us. Anyone using it in a web server environment with reports exceeding the 40 page range and wanting to do this dynamically will need to use threading so the user doesn't fall to sleep.

Jay Wright
Saturday, July 17, 2004