Mono(non-Windows) Report Writing?

Question

Hello, we are making an application to run on both Mono and .Net. The application is web based, so it uses ASP.Net.

We are now trying to find some kind of reporting software. We would prefer if there was a designer that end users(non-programmers) would be able to use like Crystal Reports.

Currently, we are not finding anything that looks even barely capable. We will have shell access on the server that Mono is running from, so it doesn't matter if there is no true web-preview or something as long as it's capable of creating a PDF on the server in an automated way.

Has anyone seen any competent report writing software that runs on Mono? (Also, licensing doesn't matter as long as it's not GPL)

edit: Really, even running something that isn't Mono such as PHP or something else light on dependencies would be ok as long as it would run on *nix systems. I just am having trouble finding anything for non-windows systems for the server and Windows systems for the designer(this is the justification for the linux tag)

Answer 1

Have a look at itextsharp Your users can create PDF documents with fields, and then you can use the itextsharp library to populate it.

Answer 2

We've finally found a reporting solution. It's not quite as pretty as Crystal or something like that, but it works, and that's what counts.

It is called FlexCel.Net http://www.tmssoftware.com/site/flexcelnet.asp

You basically design reports in Excel using special markup(actually, you can even design reports in OpenOffice cause thats what I had to do cause there is something wrong with Excel licensing for me)

It's pretty powerful and cheap, about $200 USD. I have already gotten a demo to run on Mono after about 5 hours of tinking and trying to understand how the demos worked. It's pretty neat though and well put together from what I've seen.. I'll come back and edit this answer if we later decide that this software is not good and we don't recommend it.

They commercially support running their software on Mono(except for the Winforms portions) and you also get full source code, so it really is a good deal. The range name = reporting band is a bit strange in the template, but it's still seeming better the more we use it.