ASP.NET Reporting Tools?
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We've been looking at the various options for ASP.NET reporting for a little while, and haven't found anything that fits our needs. I thought I'd ask and see if anyone else has a suggestion. Here is the scenario: We frequently develop custom reporting solutions for small to medium businesses. (We typically work mostly with small restaurant groups or chains) The most typical need is for drill down reporting, i.e. start from a consolidated company snapshot report, click on a number and drill down to the individual site details, drill down again into the details of a number in that report, and so on all the way down to an individual check. Right now the report presentation is all done with XSLT templates that are written and maintained by hand, and no customer in their right mind would try to change. We've gotten more and more requests from customers who want a solution like this, but want to be self sufficient, at least at some level. Nothing available seems to have the combination of flexibility to do the drill down reporting along with a decent GUI editor that an non-technical user could work with. We've seen this type of reporting in other products, so is everyone rolling their own, or have we just missed some obvious product out there?
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We've been looking at the various options for ASP.NET reporting for a little while, and haven't found anything that fits our needs. I thought I'd ask and see if anyone else has a suggestion. Here is the scenario: We frequently develop custom reporting solutions for small to medium businesses. (We typically work mostly with small restaurant groups or chains) The most typical need is for drill down reporting, i.e. start from a consolidated company snapshot report, click on a number and drill down to the individual site details, drill down again into the details of a number in that report, and so on all the way down to an individual check. Right now the report presentation is all done with XSLT templates that are written and maintained by hand, and no customer in their right mind would try to change. We've gotten more and more requests from customers who want a solution like this, but want to be self sufficient, at least at some level. Nothing available seems to have the combination of flexibility to do the drill down reporting along with a decent GUI editor that an non-technical user could work with. We've seen this type of reporting in other products, so is everyone rolling their own, or have we just missed some obvious product out there?
Got SQL Server? Look at Reporting Services[^]. We rolled our own for a previous project based on nested Repeaters and it worked out OK, although memory consumption was horrible and it was very slow, until we worked out where we were creating way too much garbage. We're going with Reporting Services for our next project. Stability. What an interesting concept. -- Chris Maunder
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Got SQL Server? Look at Reporting Services[^]. We rolled our own for a previous project based on nested Repeaters and it worked out OK, although memory consumption was horrible and it was very slow, until we worked out where we were creating way too much garbage. We're going with Reporting Services for our next project. Stability. What an interesting concept. -- Chris Maunder
Unforunately, 90% of our customers are fine with MSDE from a size and performance perspective. Tacking on the SQL Server license on top of our fees would kill most deals. These are typically smaller operators, and they watch every penny. We're talking some that use dial-up to send their transaction data back to the corporate server as a batch after hours over the main number rather than pay for DSL or a second phone line.