I find SSRS produces typically ugly reports and the .rdl usually ends up being a pretty complex beast, hard to tweak and maintain.
Do you know a better toolkit?
It doesn't necessarily have to do it all by itself. It could be split in parts:
Or am I just using it wrong and it can produce easily maintainable great looking charts and reports?
If you're connecting to a data source that allows JDBC access, I highly recommend BIRT as a reporting solution. We use it for generating HTML and PDF reports (it can do more) for our web reporting solution.
Report designs are done in Eclipse (standard drag-and-drop sort of stuff) and deployed to a web server for running.
As of Eclipse Ganymede, BIRT is now one of the 20-or-so core projects in Eclipse. And, it's free.
SSRS is really more for very simple tabular reports.
For the things you're looking for, you could go with Crystal Reports but that's pretty expensive. Or try i-net Crystal-Clear, fully Java-based and a lot cheaper than CR.
It can export to PDF, HTML, SVG, as well as have the reports be shown in its own applet viewer.
Has points 1, 2, and 4 on your list, has a great API and a graphical report template designer.
Note that a similar question has been asked before.
In my experience, SSRS is a reporting tool written for Developers. By exposing the RDL, it gives a programmer full control over the report. Don't like what you see in the Design tool - open the RDL much like you would when writting ASP.NET or a Winform UI and need to access the code behind. Same for formatting, etc - you have extreme control over the formatting using a programming language (granted it is VB.NET, but once you are use to it, it isn't so bad). You can add logic to just about any formatting property you need. Ultimately, the power is in the ability to fine tune your stored procs or other data sources such as XML - yes, you can write a report against an XML datasource.
In the 2008 version, you can write local reports that don't need to be deployed to the web service (I know that is a knock against SSRS also).
More flexibility - program against the Reporting Service itself. Want to send a report to the user as an Excel - program that against the reporting service API.
I found Crystal to be very limiting as a programmer - it is tailored more for the business analyst. ActiveReports offers some of this flexibility, but not the depth.
You could always try ActiveReports from Data Dynamics. It has been around a long time and has many users. It is definitely focused on developers. I'm not sure exactly what you're needs are but you might want to try out the other products at the site a look too.
wow I totally disagree.. I think that you just need to get better with SSRS