We're webifying a winforms app with a mix of active reports and crystal reports. All will somehow be converted to PDF. There are so many tools out there. Anyone have experience with/recommendations for tools that we can use?
SQL Reports are one possibility, but I'd like to explore other options instead of just taking what initially seems to be the easy way.
I have a little experience with iText for Java which seems to a well-accepted solution; there's a .NET version called iTextSharp
I have used http://www.websupergoo.com/abcpdf-1.htm and it works really well for me. You can add images and everything. I am using it where I take XML and XSLT as a template, pass in the transform (the XSLT converts to HTML) and the PDF generator will generate my page properly.
Yes, the component has a cost, but I find it worth it some times to pay a small cost then spending hours and hours trying to get something else to work.
if all you need to is to convert a report to PDF the VisualStudio Report Generator will do that for you out of the box. Otherwise I second iTextSharp.
I've used Expert PDF Converter which lets me create a PDF from the HTML. I basically render an aspx page and send the output to the component which turns it into a pdf. It's nice in that I can print a WYSIYG experience for the user. Its not perfect but for $500 its a good value.
I’m not sure if this is what you are looking for, but Crystal reports can export the reports directly to PDF so you can generate the report on the server directly in PDF format and return that PDF to the user.
If what you are looking for is a tool that allows you to generate PDF files directly then a good option is, like some colleagues has commented, iTextSharp. With iTextSharp you can generate PDF documents programmatically from scratch or from XML files.
Some useful links:
iTextSharp on Sourceforge
ITextSharp section on iT3XT.com
I've had good experiences with PDFsharp. It's fairly low level and provides a familiar way to draw text, images, etc. on a document. Here's some sample code.
It's free to use for both personal & commercial projects.
I'm not sure if you're looking for a component to create PDF files or trying to migrate your current reports formats to an ASP.NET site where the data can be downloaded as a PDF file. For the former I'd recommend iTextSharp. For the latter I'd recommend Devexpress XtraReports. Note that XtraReports supports exporting to PDF format out of the box.