Crystal Reports .Net Guidance

Question

We have been using .Net and Visual Studio for the last six years, and early on developed a number of web based reporting applications using the .Net version of Crystal Reports that was bundled with Visual Studio. My overall opinion of that product has been, to say the least, rather unimpressed. It seemed to be incredibly difficult and convoluted to use, we had to make security changes, install various extra software, and so on.

Now, we are moving to VS2008 and version 3.5 of the .Net framework, and the time has come to redevelop some of these old applications. The developers who used (and somehow mastered) Crystal .Net have long gone, and I am facing a decision - do we stick with Crystal Reports or move to something else. We also have the "full" version of Crystal Reports XI at our disposal.

The way we use the product is to product pdf versions of data extracted from various databases. While some apps use the inbuilt Crystal Reports viewer as well, this seems to be redundant now with the flexibility of grid views - but there is still the need to produce a pdf version of the data in teh grid for printing, or in Excel format to download.

What is the concensus? Is Crystal Reports .Net worth persisting with, or should we work out how to use version XI? Alternatively, is there a simple and low cost way to generate pdf reports without using Crystal? What good sources of "how to" information have others found and recommend? Are there suitable books, designed for VS2008 / .Net 3.5 development that you have used and found of benefit?

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Like you, I've had poor experiences with Crystal Reports, and my gut instinct is to post "avoid it at all costs" in all caps with lots of exclamation points. However, I've had my afternoon nap today, so I'll post like a grownup.

If all you're looking to do is pdf-ize (yes, it's a real word, damnit!) then you might look into some of the PDF widgets like ABCPDF and the like. It's relatively easy to pop a well-formatted web page into a PDF document and be done with it.

However, if you need tight report formatting, consider sticking with crystal reports -- you have a big investment and knowledge base in the technology. Or, alternately, you could switch to ActiveReports or SQL Server reporting services.

I guess the cost/benefit analysis is the cost of retraining your dev team, and investing in the new technologies.

Answer 2

Move away from CR: just get a good PDF generator and Excel engine for .NET, and feed those using your own database code. You can use all the powerful .NET features, including LINQ, without having to wrestle with the Crystal Reports runtime and its woefully inadequate documentation and support.

Answer 3

I have experience with reporting in CrystalReports ( trying lite version bundled with Visual Studio ), ActiveReports from DataDynamics ( 4 years, full version ), Reporting from Telerik ( trying trial version ) and XtraReports from DevExpress ( last one year ).

I think ( and not only me :) ), the CrystalReports are most uneficient tool ( developer productivity ) from this tools. The DataDynamics are much, much more better, bud is littlebit buggy :(. Last year we decided to change reporting suite - we have choosed a XtraReports ( with source code ), and I'm totaly happy. The price is little, no bugs ( to now :) ), wonderfull support, and ( the most important ) the productivity was grown a lot.

I recomend you DevExpress's or Telerik's reporting tools.

Answer 4

I can suggest that the built in Microsoft reporting framework works adequately. You can do local reports or MS SQL server based reports. There is a client control that displays reports and can export to formats such as pdf and Excel. Visual Studio can handle report design for the stack.

As far as if it is better than Crystal Reports, I'd say check it out and see if you like it any better or worse. I've worked with the Microsoft Report Viewer more than Crystal Reports but both seem to be fairly similar. Offhand, Crystal Reports seems to be a more advanced reporting tool but more complicated.

I'm not sure about how to utilize the Microsoft Report Viewer infrastructure outside of Visual Studio. If you are using Visual Studio it should all be available in there and you can follow the online help instructions for deploying the pieces for your servers to your servers.

Answer 5

I have used ActiveReports from DataDynamics and Crystal Reports. Of these two, I would recommend ActiveReports above Crystal based on ease of use and, more importantly, future maintenance.

Answer 6

We use Crystal in our shop too. We are currently on 8.5, which is way old and is no longer supported by SAP. We tried to upgrade to CRXI recently, which involved an entirely new API. We had to shelf the effort due to other priorities. While working on the upgrade I found support for CRXI on a number of forums. Google it.

I believe you can find a cheap way to generate PDFs without using Crystal. I believe Adobe gives the creation part away for free. I would visit their site and look into it.

I would recommend staying with Crystal only if you had a lot of reports that were already using that technology.

Answer 7

I would recommended i-net Crystal-Clear. It can read your existing *.rpt file. Has a better API.

Answer 8

Get out of Crystal Reports. They are poor.

Check out SQL Reporting Services. It works very well with .NET. Try it out. There is a learning curve, but when is there not?