Crystal reports or Eclipse BIRT

Question

I'm looking at a reporting solution for an existing application.

Currently it has code for reporting.

Users have expressed interest in Crystal reports.

Eclipse BIRT seems to do the same thing(s) and cost nothing.

Reports will be BIG ( tens of thousands of pages)

and cover about a dozen report sets. Tables, graphs and charts. Large graphs. (18'x30') Large paper sizes sometimes. (A0 continuous, with sticky tape to join it.) Java,JEE, client server no web. Installed at customers site(s) not an internet application. Customers data sets are proprietary.

Experience anyone ?

Answer 1

I have no experience of BIRT, Crystal Reports for eclipse is free (as in beer) too and is certainly capable of producing very big reports.

Answer 2

We use BIRT as part of our product and we're very happy with both BIRT itself and the support provided by the community.

We provide pre-canned reports (200 and growing) and allow the customer to make their own as well. Eclipse/BIRT makes this relatively easy although generating a mass of reports is a pain in the GUI (not just BIRT, any GUI) so we have a batch process to take a relatively simple configuration file describing the reports, and generating the rptdesign files.

One piece of advice, if you're creating reports thousands of pages long, you're probably not doing it right :-) We try to keep our reports relatively simple so as to minimize the data traveling "across the wire" and to better target the audience. I can't imaging who, in their right mind, would want to read a thousand page report.

Answer 3

BIRT is relatively simple to use for simple things, but for complex things it is a bit confusing. The documentation is very poor in certain areas, in particular the API doc is not updated frequently. Do you need to do anything that is not exactly like the standard BIRT examples, aside from page size?

Check what you need to do, as Horcrux7 said -- if you'll need to write a custom extension for a data source/output format, process TIFF images or deal with multiple "datasets" in one report item, you just might lose a few years off of your life-span and grow more bald solving the problem. :-)

BIRT is heavily dependent on Eclipse, and thus quite flaky. However, my experience with Crystal Reports has been somewhat worse, so I give it some slack. Just note that BIRT is not open source in the usual way -- one company is responsible for nearly all there is to it, and there is very little real "development community" to lean on, just any internal people whose supervisor might deign to allow him to throw you a bone. The poor documentation of the source code and occasional bizarre OOP hierarchies leave the beginning obfuscated code contestant speechless. :-)

Answer 4

Tim, you are expecting to have "tens of thousands of pages"? Is someone going to read that?

You dont need a Business Inteligence or Reporting Tool. You need to develop a program that write directly into the printer to produce listings.

Are u printing the bible?