Reporting Frameworks
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Steve_Harris wrote:
I've been tasked with Aaaargh! Mad Noooooo!
Task is a verb is it not? Past present tense? Am I missing something!? ;)
It definitely isn't definatley
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Today's lesson is brought to you by the word "niggardly". Remember kids, don't attribute to racism what can be explained by Scandinavian language roots. -- Robert Royall
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I've been tasked with researching some alternatives to SQL Server Reporting Services and was wondering what experiences and recommendations anyone out there has? I've also seen a couple of add-ons for reporting services, some of which look quite promising - has anyone got any experience of these? PS Ideally not Crystal Reports - I had to use this in an old job and *hated* it!! Cheers
It definitely isn't definatley
moon_stick wrote:
I've been tasked with researching some alternatives to SQL Server Reporting Services...
My condolences as you have been sent on a fool's errand. ;P Btw, have you looked into Cognos?
The world is a stage and most of us are desperately unrehearsed. —Sean O’Casey, Playwright
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moon_stick wrote:
Task is a verb is it not?
No it isn't! Task is a noun not a verb. :D What's wrong with "I was given the job of ....."
'Tasking' someone or being 'tasked' is military and project management speak. Gee, have you not dialed in on these new old terms. You're wasting our cycles.
The world is a stage and most of us are desperately unrehearsed. —Sean O’Casey, Playwright
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Hmmm, OED appears to contradict... task • noun a piece of work to be done. • verb 1 (task with) assign (a task) to. 2 make great demands on. — PHRASES take to task reprimand or criticize. — ORIGIN Old French tasche, from Latin taxare ‘censure, charge’.
It definitely isn't definatley
Verbing of nouns is a vile creeping Americanization and should be stamped out lest the evil persist. Plus "tasked with" sounds horrible... X|
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Verbing of nouns is a vile creeping Americanization and should be stamped out lest the evil persist. Plus "tasked with" sounds horrible... X|
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I've been tasked with researching some alternatives to SQL Server Reporting Services and was wondering what experiences and recommendations anyone out there has? I've also seen a couple of add-ons for reporting services, some of which look quite promising - has anyone got any experience of these? PS Ideally not Crystal Reports - I had to use this in an old job and *hated* it!! Cheers
It definitely isn't definatley
About 4 years ago we had to choose a new reporting engine to get away from the horrifying abomination that was Crystal Reports and the even more horrifying company and their insane policies that published CR at the time. We tried ActiveReports and settled on it, then halfway through production realized how primitive and limited it was and by good fortune stumbled across DevExpress XtraReports which we've used since then. However, time marches on and now I've noticed that Telerik has what appears to be a pretty good reporting component and I've not looked at ActiveReports since so perhaps they've matured the product greatly. The thing I like about XtraReports is it has a great end user report designer which is royalty free and very easy to wire up if you want to give end users the ability to create or modify reports. Also it supports C# behind the report right in the end user designer so you can come up with some pretty sophisticated stuff. If I were starting over again I'd have a look at those three and evaluate them all.
"It's so simple to be wise. Just think of something stupid to say and then don't say it." -Sam Levenson
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I've been tasked with researching some alternatives to SQL Server Reporting Services and was wondering what experiences and recommendations anyone out there has? I've also seen a couple of add-ons for reporting services, some of which look quite promising - has anyone got any experience of these? PS Ideally not Crystal Reports - I had to use this in an old job and *hated* it!! Cheers
It definitely isn't definatley
Xcelsius, Access, even Excel but remember this - never stray to the dark side (i.e. avoid Crystal).
Continuous effort - not strength or intelligence - is the key to unlocking our potential.(Winston Churchill)
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After a brief experience with Crystal I decide wrote my own engine, it can product stunning reports, which hardly any effort, but using c# as the driving language. I aggree these tools are aimed for the users, and trying to simplfy creating reports actually complicates the UI, it seems no software house can solve this problem.
Software Kinetics - Moving software
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I've been tasked with researching some alternatives to SQL Server Reporting Services and was wondering what experiences and recommendations anyone out there has? I've also seen a couple of add-ons for reporting services, some of which look quite promising - has anyone got any experience of these? PS Ideally not Crystal Reports - I had to use this in an old job and *hated* it!! Cheers
It definitely isn't definatley
I feel your pain. I'm currently in the middle of writing a printing "framework" for on of our internal applications. It's turning out to be a real PITA considering how flexible it has to be and how terrible a programmer I am.
Don't blame me. I voted for Chuck Norris.
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I've been tasked with researching some alternatives to SQL Server Reporting Services and was wondering what experiences and recommendations anyone out there has? I've also seen a couple of add-ons for reporting services, some of which look quite promising - has anyone got any experience of these? PS Ideally not Crystal Reports - I had to use this in an old job and *hated* it!! Cheers
It definitely isn't definatley
Why is it that every man and his dog feels it's necessary to write their own report writer? Along with code generators it seems to be a favourite project of software developers, but rarely comes up with anything more than an expensive experiment - satisfying the programmer who writes it but not the customer who's paying for it. Report writers are just another meta-problem like code generators and ORM frameworks - fun for the developer but don't produce bang for buck for the client. Clients aren't paying us as developers to solve the problems we find interesting, but paying us to solve their particular business problem. [Sorry, just a rant about the million or so custom reporting engines out there] In my experience users always want to be able to customise their reports - and most reporting frameworks don't allow this or charge exorbitant license fees (where the user then needs training to use the tool). More often than not the users come back to us as developers to just produce the report for them. I don't think there is a perfect reporting framework out there for any one particular project, and it really comes down to the particular requirements of the project as to what you should use. Can you fill us in on your particular requirements? I've used Crystal Reports before, and for the most popular reporting tool out there I'm yet to find someone who's used it that actually likes it or swears by it. Personally I've encountered so many issues just deploying Crystal Reports in the times I've used it (spending much time in their kb for workarounds to their bugs) that I couldn't recommend it. I haven't used the full SQL Server Reporting Services but have used the local report engine (RDLC), which for all intents and purposes is the same thing. But you are likely to hit problems once you get beyond anything but basic reports in my experience. There are a number of others out there that I haven't used but look OK (Telerik, XtraReports, etc). Ultimately the only solution I've ever found to be popular with users is to generate reports as Word or Excel documents (either through automation, a VSTO addin, or populate it on a server using the Office Open XML or WordML formats). Users can then customise them to their needs, and if you have a template system (easy to do) they can create their own. Especially easy with Office 2007 with the Office Open XML standards (though I've also done it with WordML for Office 2003 compatibility). The advantages are that almost every user will have Office on their desktop,
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Hey Rajesh Aren't you in Mumbai? Hope you are doing OK? Chandra
Hi Chandra, Thank you very much for the love. I actually split time between Mumbai and Bangalore. At the time of attack, I was fortunately at Bangalore (if I were at Mumbai, I would have been definitely at the CST station at the time of attack). I'm done mourning at the death of an ex-colleague (he has two wonderful daughters aged at 3 and 7) and his wife is visually impaired. He was a very nice and kind man. It was disheartening to see how he was shot like a dog on the road. I felt like my own home was being attacked, as I've spent far too much time at Mumbai and it's my favorite place in this country. God bless us and bring peace!
It is a crappy thing, but it's life -^ Carlo Pallini
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Hi Chandra, Thank you very much for the love. I actually split time between Mumbai and Bangalore. At the time of attack, I was fortunately at Bangalore (if I were at Mumbai, I would have been definitely at the CST station at the time of attack). I'm done mourning at the death of an ex-colleague (he has two wonderful daughters aged at 3 and 7) and his wife is visually impaired. He was a very nice and kind man. It was disheartening to see how he was shot like a dog on the road. I felt like my own home was being attacked, as I've spent far too much time at Mumbai and it's my favorite place in this country. God bless us and bring peace!
It is a crappy thing, but it's life -^ Carlo Pallini
That's really sad about your friend... how can one explain what happened to such small kids?
Rajesh R Subramanian wrote:
God bless us and bring peace!
Call me a cynic, but I don't think the peace part is going to happen anytime soon :( Good to know you are OK, though... stay safe.
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I've been tasked with researching some alternatives to SQL Server Reporting Services and was wondering what experiences and recommendations anyone out there has? I've also seen a couple of add-ons for reporting services, some of which look quite promising - has anyone got any experience of these? PS Ideally not Crystal Reports - I had to use this in an old job and *hated* it!! Cheers
It definitely isn't definatley
I have used Crystal Reports when I was programming with C++, and hated it. When we moved to C# I tried several alternatives: 1) Crystal Reports (again) - 1 out of 10 2) SQL Server Reporting Services - 5 out of 10 3) XtraReports - 7 out of 10 4) StimulReports - 9 out of 10 I have found StimulSoft's product to be robust, fast and easy to use. They also have a web designer if you need that. HTH
--- Regards, Martin.
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I've been tasked with researching some alternatives to SQL Server Reporting Services and was wondering what experiences and recommendations anyone out there has? I've also seen a couple of add-ons for reporting services, some of which look quite promising - has anyone got any experience of these? PS Ideally not Crystal Reports - I had to use this in an old job and *hated* it!! Cheers
It definitely isn't definatley
Data Dynamics ActiveReports -- Hands down. I've used it on two big projects. Have used Crystal, and SSRS as well. Crystal is expensive and hard to depoly. "Hard" probably is an understatement. Everything seems fine in staging, but go to deploy into production and watch you app explode for no apparent reason. If your report writers already know Crystal, they can make the transistion to Active Reports in about a day. It's very similar in the designer. Have fun.
Thanks. KHadden
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I've been tasked with researching some alternatives to SQL Server Reporting Services and was wondering what experiences and recommendations anyone out there has? I've also seen a couple of add-ons for reporting services, some of which look quite promising - has anyone got any experience of these? PS Ideally not Crystal Reports - I had to use this in an old job and *hated* it!! Cheers
It definitely isn't definatley
I purchased Telerik Reporting 4 weeks ago - pretty impressed. flexible enough to fit in with your preferred data access methods
---Guy H ;-)---
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What happened that nearly got you fired for using SQL Server Reporting Services ? I'm looking at using it for a current project as dropping a reportviewer out of visual studio takes care of the pdf export. If it's likely to do something that gets me fired then it'd be useful to know about it in advance. Thanks
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Any chance there's an article? I would definitely be interested in reading it.
Don't blame me. I voted for Chuck Norris.
I'm afraid the Report Engine was written for the company during company time and drives all our reports. So in the particular case I wouldn't be able to do it.
Software Kinetics - Moving software
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DevExpress' XtraReports[^] works for me. Cheers, Drew.
I've just started using this having tried MS and Crystal. So far so good! The help and suppoprt these guys offer is also outstanding.
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I have used Crystal Reports when I was programming with C++, and hated it. When we moved to C# I tried several alternatives: 1) Crystal Reports (again) - 1 out of 10 2) SQL Server Reporting Services - 5 out of 10 3) XtraReports - 7 out of 10 4) StimulReports - 9 out of 10 I have found StimulSoft's product to be robust, fast and easy to use. They also have a web designer if you need that. HTH
--- Regards, Martin.
Martin's experience fits in almost exactly with mine. I would therefore like to add my vote for Stimulsoft Reports which is reasonably priced and has a good royalty free end user designer that can easily be made to look like part of your application and which you can customise to hide stuff that might confuse them or give them the power to cock something up (e.g. the code behind the reports). The new version has increased in price but it would take years to write it myself so buying it for a fraction of the cost makes a great deal of sense. You might need to train users in using the designer if they are not familiar with that sort of product, but hey that sounds like a chargeable extra to me :-) Chris Bray
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I wrote my own.
Article???
ed ~"Watch your thoughts; they become your words. Watch your words they become your actions. Watch your actions; they become your habits. Watch your habits; they become your character. Watch your character; it becomes your destiny." -Frank Outlaw.
