What is the status of report generation these days?
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What goes around comes around, and justice grinds slowly. It appears I have some report generation in my future for a couple of projects. I know a limited Crystal Reports version used to ship with VS 6 (yeah, that far back). I'm curious what everyone *here* uses these days. What do you hate, what will you tolerate? I'd ask what do you love, but then, I've never heard of anyone loving a report generation tool. :) I have two needs - the first is to be able to generate ad hoc reports against a couple of internal databases. People want to play with generating their own reports, so I need something relatively simple to use. The second is more production oriented for a manufacturing system. They'll be a canned set of reports generated on an order by order basis. Yes, I did a google search, but all I get are myriads of pages listing the top 10 report tools and direct links to the company pages.
Charlie Gilley <italic>Stuck in a dysfunctional matrix from which I must escape... "Where liberty dwells, there is my country." B. Franklin, 1783 “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759
Roll your own. Back around 2007 I wrote a simple reporting module for an application I was working on. It uses XML and XLST to allow the user to view the results in either Excel for a browser.
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:) Why is your name on that page? :laugh:
Charlie Gilley <italic>Stuck in a dysfunctional matrix from which I must escape... "Where liberty dwells, there is my country." B. Franklin, 1783 “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759
Why not 😆
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Roll your own. Back around 2007 I wrote a simple reporting module for an application I was working on. It uses XML and XLST to allow the user to view the results in either Excel for a browser.
The reports are simple enough (based on the sql I know needs to be done) you may have a point (for the second application).
Charlie Gilley <italic>Stuck in a dysfunctional matrix from which I must escape... "Where liberty dwells, there is my country." B. Franklin, 1783 “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759
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What goes around comes around, and justice grinds slowly. It appears I have some report generation in my future for a couple of projects. I know a limited Crystal Reports version used to ship with VS 6 (yeah, that far back). I'm curious what everyone *here* uses these days. What do you hate, what will you tolerate? I'd ask what do you love, but then, I've never heard of anyone loving a report generation tool. :) I have two needs - the first is to be able to generate ad hoc reports against a couple of internal databases. People want to play with generating their own reports, so I need something relatively simple to use. The second is more production oriented for a manufacturing system. They'll be a canned set of reports generated on an order by order basis. Yes, I did a google search, but all I get are myriads of pages listing the top 10 report tools and direct links to the company pages.
Charlie Gilley <italic>Stuck in a dysfunctional matrix from which I must escape... "Where liberty dwells, there is my country." B. Franklin, 1783 “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759
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What goes around comes around, and justice grinds slowly. It appears I have some report generation in my future for a couple of projects. I know a limited Crystal Reports version used to ship with VS 6 (yeah, that far back). I'm curious what everyone *here* uses these days. What do you hate, what will you tolerate? I'd ask what do you love, but then, I've never heard of anyone loving a report generation tool. :) I have two needs - the first is to be able to generate ad hoc reports against a couple of internal databases. People want to play with generating their own reports, so I need something relatively simple to use. The second is more production oriented for a manufacturing system. They'll be a canned set of reports generated on an order by order basis. Yes, I did a google search, but all I get are myriads of pages listing the top 10 report tools and direct links to the company pages.
Charlie Gilley <italic>Stuck in a dysfunctional matrix from which I must escape... "Where liberty dwells, there is my country." B. Franklin, 1783 “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759
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What goes around comes around, and justice grinds slowly. It appears I have some report generation in my future for a couple of projects. I know a limited Crystal Reports version used to ship with VS 6 (yeah, that far back). I'm curious what everyone *here* uses these days. What do you hate, what will you tolerate? I'd ask what do you love, but then, I've never heard of anyone loving a report generation tool. :) I have two needs - the first is to be able to generate ad hoc reports against a couple of internal databases. People want to play with generating their own reports, so I need something relatively simple to use. The second is more production oriented for a manufacturing system. They'll be a canned set of reports generated on an order by order basis. Yes, I did a google search, but all I get are myriads of pages listing the top 10 report tools and direct links to the company pages.
Charlie Gilley <italic>Stuck in a dysfunctional matrix from which I must escape... "Where liberty dwells, there is my country." B. Franklin, 1783 “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759
Wow! You're still here, Charlie? Happy New Year - this is #17 for this site, isn't it? It's getting hard to find many of us old timers here... Good to see you still above ground!
Will Rogers never met me.
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What goes around comes around, and justice grinds slowly. It appears I have some report generation in my future for a couple of projects. I know a limited Crystal Reports version used to ship with VS 6 (yeah, that far back). I'm curious what everyone *here* uses these days. What do you hate, what will you tolerate? I'd ask what do you love, but then, I've never heard of anyone loving a report generation tool. :) I have two needs - the first is to be able to generate ad hoc reports against a couple of internal databases. People want to play with generating their own reports, so I need something relatively simple to use. The second is more production oriented for a manufacturing system. They'll be a canned set of reports generated on an order by order basis. Yes, I did a google search, but all I get are myriads of pages listing the top 10 report tools and direct links to the company pages.
Charlie Gilley <italic>Stuck in a dysfunctional matrix from which I must escape... "Where liberty dwells, there is my country." B. Franklin, 1783 “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759
While things come back round, you'll find user expectations are way different. Everybody has an iPad or some touch device and wants instant touch and play on the reports. We've moved to Power BI (at great cost) and people love it. MS is putting a lot of effort behind it, and the desktop version is free if you just want to see what's possible. If you know excel, you can create a report simply (if the devs setup certified data sets or similar, or you have access to do so). You'll want the 'application owns the data' integration (MS website will lead you down P1 (£5k/month min) where you end up with all your customers on active directory)... However, you can just use an A1 (£700/month) under this method: Embed content in your Power BI embedded analytics application enabling better embedded BI insights for your organization - Power BI | Microsoft Docs[^] You can start with no cost, see what's possible. The user interface is great. What you can't do.... If you want a report of an 'invoice', this is not the tool for that. Then you're back at SSRS type reports in Power BI (also back to £5l/month min!) If you wanted an interactive report of say, all your stock, how it's sold over time and filter it by whatever you want, then this is the tool. If you want, it is possible to have a subset of user's with full power bi access... they can then create their own dashboards from all / any part of your reports. You can then make that available in your application. So there is a sliding scale of how much you use it. To anybody who's making simple spreadsheets and then wants some charts... go download power bi desktop for free and click 'get data' and choose your excel sheet... make a nice chart etc. and then you can update the sheet and the report updates too! Given that, if the reports are for INTERNAL use only (not customers) you can, actually use power bi with no cost, I know of one huge organisation that's doing that.. and we're like great, but if you want all these 1000's of user's to access it, it's going to cost you... so the MS grand plan to take your money works in the end!
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What goes around comes around, and justice grinds slowly. It appears I have some report generation in my future for a couple of projects. I know a limited Crystal Reports version used to ship with VS 6 (yeah, that far back). I'm curious what everyone *here* uses these days. What do you hate, what will you tolerate? I'd ask what do you love, but then, I've never heard of anyone loving a report generation tool. :) I have two needs - the first is to be able to generate ad hoc reports against a couple of internal databases. People want to play with generating their own reports, so I need something relatively simple to use. The second is more production oriented for a manufacturing system. They'll be a canned set of reports generated on an order by order basis. Yes, I did a google search, but all I get are myriads of pages listing the top 10 report tools and direct links to the company pages.
Charlie Gilley <italic>Stuck in a dysfunctional matrix from which I must escape... "Where liberty dwells, there is my country." B. Franklin, 1783 “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759
My experience of any report generator over the past 40ish years is to forget them. from a programming side they are hard and time consuming to write & document, and come up with anything that an end user can learn or use easily, (and most dont want to have to learn anything new anyway). I now take one of two methods when my systems don't give a user exactly what then want or they have a 'special' requirement. firstly i offer a service to write the report for them as an add-on or integrated option to an existing format and try to keep the price down, and secondly (and more popular) is to write a csv output dumping all the data they need, whereby they can use excel to re-jig it as they want, as most companies have people familiar with it. a lesser used option is for people to do it themselves either in sql server or access for example and i will assist in explaining schema's, but that's very few. I also dont like to use 3rd party add-ons as you not only have to learn and support them, which can be time consuming for little reward, but give you a great deal of pain updating, maintaining licences or whatever. GL
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What goes around comes around, and justice grinds slowly. It appears I have some report generation in my future for a couple of projects. I know a limited Crystal Reports version used to ship with VS 6 (yeah, that far back). I'm curious what everyone *here* uses these days. What do you hate, what will you tolerate? I'd ask what do you love, but then, I've never heard of anyone loving a report generation tool. :) I have two needs - the first is to be able to generate ad hoc reports against a couple of internal databases. People want to play with generating their own reports, so I need something relatively simple to use. The second is more production oriented for a manufacturing system. They'll be a canned set of reports generated on an order by order basis. Yes, I did a google search, but all I get are myriads of pages listing the top 10 report tools and direct links to the company pages.
Charlie Gilley <italic>Stuck in a dysfunctional matrix from which I must escape... "Where liberty dwells, there is my country." B. Franklin, 1783 “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759
MS ReportViewer control is database agnostic in local mode. Usable in a Web or Desktop application Get started with Report Viewer controls - SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) | Microsoft Docs[^] Microsoft RDLC Report Designer - Visual Studio Marketplace[^] Microsoft Reporting Services Projects - Visual Studio Marketplace[^] NuGet Gallery | Microsoft.ReportingServices.ReportViewerControl.WebForms 150.1427.0[^] NuGet Gallery | Microsoft.ReportingServices.ReportViewerControl.Winforms 150.1427.0[^] Some advices: ReportViewer Tutorial[^]
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Wow! You're still here, Charlie? Happy New Year - this is #17 for this site, isn't it? It's getting hard to find many of us old timers here... Good to see you still above ground!
Will Rogers never met me.
Still kicking - just busy busy. It was a long 2020. :) Wow, 17 years, I have to think who I was working for that far back. I was transitioning from server/mainframe development - openVMS and straight C - to the Windows desktop. Interestingly, that was the last time I was doing DB application development. The company loved their flat files. Ugh.
Charlie Gilley <italic>Stuck in a dysfunctional matrix from which I must escape... "Where liberty dwells, there is my country." B. Franklin, 1783 “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759
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What goes around comes around, and justice grinds slowly. It appears I have some report generation in my future for a couple of projects. I know a limited Crystal Reports version used to ship with VS 6 (yeah, that far back). I'm curious what everyone *here* uses these days. What do you hate, what will you tolerate? I'd ask what do you love, but then, I've never heard of anyone loving a report generation tool. :) I have two needs - the first is to be able to generate ad hoc reports against a couple of internal databases. People want to play with generating their own reports, so I need something relatively simple to use. The second is more production oriented for a manufacturing system. They'll be a canned set of reports generated on an order by order basis. Yes, I did a google search, but all I get are myriads of pages listing the top 10 report tools and direct links to the company pages.
Charlie Gilley <italic>Stuck in a dysfunctional matrix from which I must escape... "Where liberty dwells, there is my country." B. Franklin, 1783 “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759
Thanks for all the replies. I'll check them all out.
Charlie Gilley <italic>Stuck in a dysfunctional matrix from which I must escape... "Where liberty dwells, there is my country." B. Franklin, 1783 “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759
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What database are you using? If it's MS SQL then you could use the include SQL Server Reporting Services.
"Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana."
Just so long as you're not planning to use .NET Core or .NET 5 - there's still no sign of SSRS support for those platforms. :sigh:
"These people looked deep within my soul and assigned me a number based on the order in which I joined." - Homer
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What goes around comes around, and justice grinds slowly. It appears I have some report generation in my future for a couple of projects. I know a limited Crystal Reports version used to ship with VS 6 (yeah, that far back). I'm curious what everyone *here* uses these days. What do you hate, what will you tolerate? I'd ask what do you love, but then, I've never heard of anyone loving a report generation tool. :) I have two needs - the first is to be able to generate ad hoc reports against a couple of internal databases. People want to play with generating their own reports, so I need something relatively simple to use. The second is more production oriented for a manufacturing system. They'll be a canned set of reports generated on an order by order basis. Yes, I did a google search, but all I get are myriads of pages listing the top 10 report tools and direct links to the company pages.
Charlie Gilley <italic>Stuck in a dysfunctional matrix from which I must escape... "Where liberty dwells, there is my country." B. Franklin, 1783 “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759
Have you looked into OpenXML? I use it to generate Excel files, and read them too but it can do more than just Excel. How to: Create a spreadsheet document by providing a file name (Open XML SDK) | Microsoft Docs[^]
Find me on twitter @dthompsonza
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What goes around comes around, and justice grinds slowly. It appears I have some report generation in my future for a couple of projects. I know a limited Crystal Reports version used to ship with VS 6 (yeah, that far back). I'm curious what everyone *here* uses these days. What do you hate, what will you tolerate? I'd ask what do you love, but then, I've never heard of anyone loving a report generation tool. :) I have two needs - the first is to be able to generate ad hoc reports against a couple of internal databases. People want to play with generating their own reports, so I need something relatively simple to use. The second is more production oriented for a manufacturing system. They'll be a canned set of reports generated on an order by order basis. Yes, I did a google search, but all I get are myriads of pages listing the top 10 report tools and direct links to the company pages.
Charlie Gilley <italic>Stuck in a dysfunctional matrix from which I must escape... "Where liberty dwells, there is my country." B. Franklin, 1783 “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759
I find Developer Express Reporting XtraReporting to meet all my needs and more. Has a user configurable mode so users can customize and save their own versions. Has a report server. Powerful designer. Worth a look. Not cheap but good tools are worth it.
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For some reason people love to knock Crystal Reports and I used to be one of them ( way back ) , but if you spend some time learning it you can create very complex and powerful reports, if you're after sexy looking reports maybe look elsewhere but for informative down to the metal reports I think it's very good. It supports the usual while / do / for loops, arrays ( albeit one dimensional ) so the limit is your imagination. As for integration with dotnet I don't know what is available these days.
"I didn't mention the bats - he'd see them soon enough" - Hunter S Thompson - RIP
We use CRW (Crystal Report Writer) for our Windows desktop application. We use it 3 different ways: 1) have our own UI for parameters that are passed to the RPT file 2) run a RPT file directly, only passing in the connection string. 3) generate data external to the RPT file, then pass in the dataset to the RPT. Either way, we have a common dialog for displaying the results that all 3 methods use. We also provide a custom reports option. A user can use CRW to create any custom report they want, drop the RPT into a specific folder, and the program will show its name in a drop-down list for them to run it. However, 100% of the time they pay us to do the custom report for them. I like CRW because of it's ease of use for beginners, yet powerful enough for whatever I want to do. Bond Keep all things as simple as possible, but no simpler. -said someone, somewhere
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What goes around comes around, and justice grinds slowly. It appears I have some report generation in my future for a couple of projects. I know a limited Crystal Reports version used to ship with VS 6 (yeah, that far back). I'm curious what everyone *here* uses these days. What do you hate, what will you tolerate? I'd ask what do you love, but then, I've never heard of anyone loving a report generation tool. :) I have two needs - the first is to be able to generate ad hoc reports against a couple of internal databases. People want to play with generating their own reports, so I need something relatively simple to use. The second is more production oriented for a manufacturing system. They'll be a canned set of reports generated on an order by order basis. Yes, I did a google search, but all I get are myriads of pages listing the top 10 report tools and direct links to the company pages.
Charlie Gilley <italic>Stuck in a dysfunctional matrix from which I must escape... "Where liberty dwells, there is my country." B. Franklin, 1783 “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759
I use ActiveReports. I find it significantly easier to use than Crystal reports. Does everything I want, including export to Excel, and email. I am have been using it since VB6, and now C#.
Oh well...
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What goes around comes around, and justice grinds slowly. It appears I have some report generation in my future for a couple of projects. I know a limited Crystal Reports version used to ship with VS 6 (yeah, that far back). I'm curious what everyone *here* uses these days. What do you hate, what will you tolerate? I'd ask what do you love, but then, I've never heard of anyone loving a report generation tool. :) I have two needs - the first is to be able to generate ad hoc reports against a couple of internal databases. People want to play with generating their own reports, so I need something relatively simple to use. The second is more production oriented for a manufacturing system. They'll be a canned set of reports generated on an order by order basis. Yes, I did a google search, but all I get are myriads of pages listing the top 10 report tools and direct links to the company pages.
Charlie Gilley <italic>Stuck in a dysfunctional matrix from which I must escape... "Where liberty dwells, there is my country." B. Franklin, 1783 “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759
Hi. If you don't mind using a standalone software for reporting, i recommend you to try [DBxtra](https://dbxtra.com/), it's easy to use (drag and drop!), and let you edit queries if you know what you're doing (SQL code). Disclaimer: I work for them.
"Science fiction is any idea that occurs in the head and doesn’t exist yet, but soon will, and will change everything for everybody, and nothing will ever be the same again." Ray Bradbury
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What goes around comes around, and justice grinds slowly. It appears I have some report generation in my future for a couple of projects. I know a limited Crystal Reports version used to ship with VS 6 (yeah, that far back). I'm curious what everyone *here* uses these days. What do you hate, what will you tolerate? I'd ask what do you love, but then, I've never heard of anyone loving a report generation tool. :) I have two needs - the first is to be able to generate ad hoc reports against a couple of internal databases. People want to play with generating their own reports, so I need something relatively simple to use. The second is more production oriented for a manufacturing system. They'll be a canned set of reports generated on an order by order basis. Yes, I did a google search, but all I get are myriads of pages listing the top 10 report tools and direct links to the company pages.
Charlie Gilley <italic>Stuck in a dysfunctional matrix from which I must escape... "Where liberty dwells, there is my country." B. Franklin, 1783 “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759
I built a data warehouse and taught my users Excel Pivot Tables. Once they get it, I am never bothered for reports again. For ad-hoc queries, this is great. I use SSRS for pre-defined reports. It is so easy to use, to update and deploy reports.
Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend; inside of a dog, it's too dark to read. -- Groucho Marx
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What goes around comes around, and justice grinds slowly. It appears I have some report generation in my future for a couple of projects. I know a limited Crystal Reports version used to ship with VS 6 (yeah, that far back). I'm curious what everyone *here* uses these days. What do you hate, what will you tolerate? I'd ask what do you love, but then, I've never heard of anyone loving a report generation tool. :) I have two needs - the first is to be able to generate ad hoc reports against a couple of internal databases. People want to play with generating their own reports, so I need something relatively simple to use. The second is more production oriented for a manufacturing system. They'll be a canned set of reports generated on an order by order basis. Yes, I did a google search, but all I get are myriads of pages listing the top 10 report tools and direct links to the company pages.
Charlie Gilley <italic>Stuck in a dysfunctional matrix from which I must escape... "Where liberty dwells, there is my country." B. Franklin, 1783 “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759
I have been using Microsoft Reporting Services local RDLC, migrated from the server using RDL, migrated from Crystal, and am about to just create reports in MVC views.
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charlieg wrote:
I've never heard of anyone loving a report generation tool.
My "boss", a DBA, loves my tools. He can generate the interface for I/O (data queries, data entry/edit/delete) and feed them to his stored procedures. All from SQL tables. It generates a table automatically from the returning record set - configurable in a feature-creep-dreamworld. It's now approaching 800 reports for the same set of php/javascript files. Even a button to convert the table returned to an excel file. Paging, for large records sets and all sorts of crap. I built into it about 40 data-base configurable HTML controls - char/numeric/VIN/drop-list (regular and parent-child that even work many-to-many), even one for javascript injection. As he noted, I made his life very easy. We don't need not stinkin' crystal reports. It is corporate-agnostic. It'll work for insurance claims or pizza orders. The generating their own reports is (via the input fields) by creating SQL filters on-the-fly. Also, line, bar, and pie charts - but as it turns out, no one wanted them once they became available. Yeah - he loves it.
"The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits." - Albert Einstein
"If you are searching for perfection in others, then you seek disappointment. If you seek perfection in yourself, then you will find failure." - Balboos HaGadol Mar 2010
But what are your tools? :)
"Qulatiy is Job #1"
