Given a C# list of some object (perhaps serialized to XML), what is the easiest way to create a flexible reporting application for that data?

Question

I'm specifically interested in ASP.NET or ASP.NET MVC as the platform, but any contributions for the good of the community are welcome irrespective of platform!

As such, there is no one right answer - hence it's a community wiki.

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We don't want to reinvent the wheel, and building a GUI to filter the data seems like overkill.

Is Reporting Services too much? Can REST help, somehow? Is there some way to build a reasonable web based GUI for reporting and filtering some list of C# objects?

I've built things in the past that dynamically generate forms (WinForms) based on classes and reflection - does something like this exist for reporting?

We don't want to spend a few days building a lovely GUI when someone will turn around and say "Oh, you should've just used XYZ!"...!!

We are also wary that sometimes getting that initial leg up from some tool can speed up the first bit, but almost bring to a halt the last, crucial 2%.

Answer 1

Awhile back, we used Crystal Reports. Don't do this.

A year or two ago, I tore out CR, serialized the data from our reports into XML, then used XSLT to convert those into HTML/CSS reports. If you're wanting to use ASP.NET MVC, I can't think of a much simpler way to do reports.