Generating PDF/Excel reports from a c# .net web application

Question

We have a system that is used by a few hundred separate customers, at the end of the month the customer likes to generate a report of the activity with his/her clients. These reports are nothing special; they maybe contain a logo, address and a few lines of mathematical data. Currently we use Crystal Reports but that is just not a pleasant experience ;) also seems like a bit of overkill as we use something like 1% of its functionality.

What have other people used to generate reports from a web application, PDF generation is a must.

Thanks

Answer 1

Well, we use CR as well. I have heard about iTextSharp, and have seen it used for pdf concatenation in our systems. Maybe thats what you look for. For Excel report generation we use csv format for simple tabular data and COM interop for more advanced reports.

Answer 2

We use SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS). Reports are built in Visual Studio. link text

Answer 3

If you just need to generate a PDF file you could use a library like ABCpdf.NET. It's around $329 per license but is easy to use and quite reliable.

Answer 4

While evaluating some of the web control suites for a decent grid, I noticed some of them had export to xls/csv/pdf built in.

Answer 5

For generating PDF output I've always used FOP or nFOP. It's a pretty good open source XSL:FO processor.

Answer 6

Always use SQL Reporting here, but if you want to create the PDFs manually then iTextSharp is pretty mature. It's actually a port of the iText Java library, so Googling for that usually turns up plenty of documentation and examples to play around with.