in search of a better printing/reporting mechanism
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hi, This should hopefully be my last question about my future hotel app. The first time i built it, i made an insane amount of classes to encapsulate printing, and even then printing was messy. I thought I could use crystal reports, but did a few tests and ran into some problems. It seems like its a nice thing when you want to just pull information straight from your database and print it but turns out pretty cumbersome when I want to use my own business objects as data for a report. I know I can add a .NET object to the report via the database expert.But, there are problems when I need data from more than one object on a report. Also, I'm not quite sure how I could feed my own data to a chart in a report. Is there any other printing/reporting scheme I can use? Or is there a particular design used with crystal reports, Printing is a very essential part of my app. Thanks so much Gideon
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hi, This should hopefully be my last question about my future hotel app. The first time i built it, i made an insane amount of classes to encapsulate printing, and even then printing was messy. I thought I could use crystal reports, but did a few tests and ran into some problems. It seems like its a nice thing when you want to just pull information straight from your database and print it but turns out pretty cumbersome when I want to use my own business objects as data for a report. I know I can add a .NET object to the report via the database expert.But, there are problems when I need data from more than one object on a report. Also, I'm not quite sure how I could feed my own data to a chart in a report. Is there any other printing/reporting scheme I can use? Or is there a particular design used with crystal reports, Printing is a very essential part of my app. Thanks so much Gideon
Previously I have suggested and recommended Logi Reports as a viable alternative to Crystal Reports. Get it FREE here http://www.freereporting.com/[^] Caution, it is a fairly large download and there are plenty of tutorials and samples there also.
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hi, This should hopefully be my last question about my future hotel app. The first time i built it, i made an insane amount of classes to encapsulate printing, and even then printing was messy. I thought I could use crystal reports, but did a few tests and ran into some problems. It seems like its a nice thing when you want to just pull information straight from your database and print it but turns out pretty cumbersome when I want to use my own business objects as data for a report. I know I can add a .NET object to the report via the database expert.But, there are problems when I need data from more than one object on a report. Also, I'm not quite sure how I could feed my own data to a chart in a report. Is there any other printing/reporting scheme I can use? Or is there a particular design used with crystal reports, Printing is a very essential part of my app. Thanks so much Gideon
I used CR for many years and have always pulled the data from the database - just the way I design things I guess. All reports were serviced by a stored procedure so to deploy a new report required a proc and a RPT file, no recompile required. A hotel app will require an enormous number of reports and each customer will want custom reports done. I liked it BC you could deploy it fairly simply (as opposed to Reporting Services) in a commercial app. I now do corporate work and use RS exclusively.
Never underestimate the power of human stupidity RAH
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I used CR for many years and have always pulled the data from the database - just the way I design things I guess. All reports were serviced by a stored procedure so to deploy a new report required a proc and a RPT file, no recompile required. A hotel app will require an enormous number of reports and each customer will want custom reports done. I liked it BC you could deploy it fairly simply (as opposed to Reporting Services) in a commercial app. I now do corporate work and use RS exclusively.
Never underestimate the power of human stupidity RAH
thanks so much for replying, but someone on the Microsoft newsgroups gave me a work around with CR. I make a new typed dataset for each report that I want to create, I have seperate tables for each chunk of data I need printed.Then I design a new report, when I need the data printed I set the datasource to a new instance of the typed dataset with all my data in it! It works like a charm, also for situations where I've needed Multiple bunches of information all over the place, I use subreports, somehow the dataset passed to the first report is automatically passed to the subreports too, so it works pretty well. Thanks!