Hi,
I've got a project where I need to generate PDF reports from a template. The report will have a header, details and a footer, and can potentially run on multiple pages.
I was going to use iTextSharp for that. For the templates i was thinking of two options:
Can you comment on the pros and cons of these two options?
Can you suggest how to create PDF Form templates using some free software?
Thanks in advance.
We have found iTextSharp a great tool for building single page PDFs, ie by dropping on Text and images. I would be interested to see the solution for a more templated approach when using datasets etc.
If you have a project where you will be building a few reports and need to edit them later it would be much quicker to use a reporting tool like ActiveReports, we use this to build some really complex reports, which can contain other reports as "subreports". To be honest the time you save building reports programatically will justify the cost of ActiveReports.
I ended up using iTextSharp with PDF Form for "master page" templates, and adding my tables, page numbers etc. on top programmatically.
PDF Form templates provide background graphics, fields which can be replaced with your values (good for one page reports - or using them for positioning guides in multipage reports).