Reporting ahhhhh!

[AndyBrew70]

Hi We have been developing a ASP.NET 1.1 business management system over the last few months and have now delayed the inevitable long enough, reporting??? In the past we have used TallComponents TallPdf to produce reports in PDF format which works well although the object model is a bit tedious to work with at times and reporting writing can be a time consuming task. However once written it was ideal, we could produce a PDF document with the report contained store it within the archive and send it to the client, email it as an attachment etc etc etc. So the issue is, we would now like a product that has some form of report designer interface to speed up report development, but has also a code based object model, and once the report is built output it in several formats i.e. html, pdf, word, excel, rtf etc. that can be saved in the report archive and dealt with as required :) So anybody had any experience of this process and maybe have a recommendation?? Many thanks in advance Andy

[Paddy Boyd]

SQL Server Reporting Services - really pretty decent as these things go.

[l0kke]

Go for MS Reporting services. If you already have licensed MS SQL Server, then it is ideal, because reporting services are part of ms sql server. What I like the most on Reporting services reports is that they are stored in RDL (report definition language) what is open xml format, so you can do with your report programmaticaly whatever you want. ReportViewer control (it is part of VS 2005, or is free to download from microsoft) supports several output formats, from ones you stated are not suported word formats. But you always can write your own rendering extension for reporting services, as format is open and extensions are easy to integrate. Another option could be Crystal reports, but I'm not so happy with it. I deffinitely prefer reporting services. Pilo