Generating Reports
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Hi Does any of you have experience with selecting a tool for generating reports? We have a large server farm with approx. 250 connecting locations, and each of the locations have approx. 4 computers. The locations needs to able to print data from a number of SQL Servers on the server farm. The data just need to be printed as text in columns, and with group boxes around some of the text. We have looked at Crystal Reports 9, but it offers a lot more than we need and it is very expensive. Thanks for your help, Mads
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Hi Does any of you have experience with selecting a tool for generating reports? We have a large server farm with approx. 250 connecting locations, and each of the locations have approx. 4 computers. The locations needs to able to print data from a number of SQL Servers on the server farm. The data just need to be printed as text in columns, and with group boxes around some of the text. We have looked at Crystal Reports 9, but it offers a lot more than we need and it is very expensive. Thanks for your help, Mads
Crystal is expensive, and I'm not that impressed with it. ASP.NET seems pretty good (I'm using it for the reports on a project), and there's a Reports Starter pack that contains example reports. That would be a good place to start. HTH -- Ian Darling
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Crystal is expensive, and I'm not that impressed with it. ASP.NET seems pretty good (I'm using it for the reports on a project), and there's a Reports Starter pack that contains example reports. That would be a good place to start. HTH -- Ian Darling
Thanks for your reply. Unfortunately, ASP.NET is not usable for the project. The clients are "smart clients" that connect to the servers through web services. We want to implement report printing this way: The user press a button on a windows form in the smart client, and a print dialog is shown. On the dialog it shall be possible to select: print preview and print. Mads
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Thanks for your reply. Unfortunately, ASP.NET is not usable for the project. The clients are "smart clients" that connect to the servers through web services. We want to implement report printing this way: The user press a button on a windows form in the smart client, and a print dialog is shown. On the dialog it shall be possible to select: print preview and print. Mads
Madsj wrote: Unfortunately, ASP.NET is not usable for the project. The clients are "smart clients" that connect to the servers through web services. Well, to be slightly contrarian, there is still room to use ASP.NET. a) It can be embedded into your client application - there is an article on CP that demostrates how to do it. b) You could pass the relevant parameters in the URL to the pages, such as which web service to collect the data from. From either you can use IE (or other suitable browser component) to display the reports and print-preview them. If you use thead, tbody and tfoot HTML tags in the rendered output, you can even get page headers and footers (in IE, anyway). Otherwise, you might try Business Objects - given they are buying CrystalDecisions, they probably have a compteing toolset. HTH -- Ian Darling
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Madsj wrote: Unfortunately, ASP.NET is not usable for the project. The clients are "smart clients" that connect to the servers through web services. Well, to be slightly contrarian, there is still room to use ASP.NET. a) It can be embedded into your client application - there is an article on CP that demostrates how to do it. b) You could pass the relevant parameters in the URL to the pages, such as which web service to collect the data from. From either you can use IE (or other suitable browser component) to display the reports and print-preview them. If you use thead, tbody and tfoot HTML tags in the rendered output, you can even get page headers and footers (in IE, anyway). Otherwise, you might try Business Objects - given they are buying CrystalDecisions, they probably have a compteing toolset. HTH -- Ian Darling
But if we use a browser to display the reports etc., we need to test our app. we a zillion browsers. And since we hate testing as much as anyone else, we really want to avoid it. Instead, we have made the selection to use the Crystal Report for .NET that is included with Visual Studio .NET. Performance might not be extraordinary but we save a lot of money. Ian, thanks for your help. Mads
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But if we use a browser to display the reports etc., we need to test our app. we a zillion browsers. And since we hate testing as much as anyone else, we really want to avoid it. Instead, we have made the selection to use the Crystal Report for .NET that is included with Visual Studio .NET. Performance might not be extraordinary but we save a lot of money. Ian, thanks for your help. Mads
No problem :-) Glad I could be of help. -- Ian Darling