Custom reporting for end users with ASP.NET

Question

Hey everyone,

Is there a third party tool or something similar that will allow users to create reports on their own without any programming?

One code base but custom reports for each user in the system that they create.

Make sense?

Answer 1

You could look at the two behemoths of reporting, namely Crystal Reports and SQL Server Reporting Services. Both can be used from within ASP.NET, though the latter obviously relies on you having your data in SQL Server (though Express is supported).

Answer 2

MS Access hooked to a replicated / read only version of the database can offer a really powerful tool at a fairly low cost and without locking production database tables.

Answer 3

ActiveReports ships with a report designer that plugs into Visual Studio. You can hook up to data sources and design your reports without doing any programming per se, but you need VS.

They also ship a component that you can drop into a Windows Forms project that gives you a full featured report designer as a standalone executable. Having taken this approach with our products, I'll have to warn that this component is not too flexible, and has a lot of idiosyncrasies. Ultimately we were satisfied with the executable we were able to build and ship with our product though, and our end users seem happy enough building their reports with it.

(We execute all the reports that they build through ASP.Net, and display the output on web pages.)

Answer 4

Hey everyone,

I took jaxidian's advice and did a search for asp.net ad-hoc reporting and found this product that looks really nice and more or less exactly what I was looking for.

http://devtools.korzh.com/eq/dotnet

Answer 5

I use LogiXML in on of my project, I think it fits your needs.

http://www.freereporting.com/

Answer 6

FastReport.Net:

1. You DO NOT NEED VS.
2. You do not need VS to EndUser's work places for giving them designer.
3. See flash demo by link - like no other (end user does not need to know about SQL or something else).
4. Report designer is run-time royalty-free.

Answer 7

i-net crystal-clear has a very nice ad-hoc reporting solution. There is also a live demo on the website that you can see what you expected. You can use it with ASP.NET, PHP and other technique.