ASP.NET and Winforms: What PDF reporting tools are out there and recommended?

Question

I have ActiveReports for .Net which is a great tool, however the version I have is not going to support Visual Studio 2010. Active Reports quite pricey, so just wondering if there are any better alternatives out there at a competitive price or even open source, before I consider upgrading.

I am looking for a reporting tool specifically, that has a designer and is programmable etc, not looking for something that can just produce PDF, eg iTextSharp etc.

Output will primarily be PDF for web and windows applications.

Using various databases, SQL Server, SQL Server Express, Azure and SQLite, so not sure SQL Server reporting services will work for all these cases.

All coments appreciated.

Answer 1

For our asp.net winforms app (.net 3.5 moving to 4.0 soon). We used to use Microsoft Reportviewer which I think has just had a new version for VS2010.

That being said we've just moved over to Telerik ReportViewer as it came with the Asp.net control toolkit we bought, and it is much easier to use. There is a very good WYSIWYG interface so you can see how the report will turn out with a proper dataset not just placeholders etc..

Answer 2

You can create RDLC reports which run within your web applicaiton (as opposed to RDL reports which are rendereed in SQL reporting services).

RDLC reports are viewable using the Report Viewer control and can be output to pdf, excel etc.

http://damsintech.blogspot.com/2009/10/working-with-microsoft-report-viewer.html

http://www.gotreportviewer.com/tables/index.html

Answer 3

The built-in Crystal Reports in Visual Studio does a good job of generating pdfs. The designer is powerful, if a little quirky. You can drive it programmatically to generate pdf output without requiring any user interaction. The deployment license is pretty liberal, but it is limited to 3 concurrent users. And it is free.

Answer 4

Report Viewer Control (2005 - 2005 sp1 - 2008 - 2008 sp1 - 2010) used on Win and Web reporting and you can bind SSRS RDL reports - Visual Studio Client reports RDLC and Crystal reports to it.

This control has some export items which let you export your report to Excell - PDF - Tiff - Doc and etc

Answer 5

I have selected FastReport.Net. Why?

• First: really easy to use and royalty free visual report designer.
• Second: Great support of ASP.Net
• Third: internal dialogs and scripting
• Fourh: full sources
• Fifth: Advanced WYSIWYG PDF export.

And excellent objects - tables/matrix for cross-tab and non-banded reports.

Let try: my likest tool for ASP.Net reporting

Answer 6

I think all of the comments here are valid and good suggestions for the right people. Just a few things to point out about ActiveReports. ActiveReports has extensive PDF support for things like:

• Comprehensive PDF Security support (passwords, prevent printing, etc.)
• Digital Signatures
• CJK (Chinese, Japanese, Korean), Arabic, Hebrew, etc.
• Advanced font support for font embedding, subset embedding, etc.
• Font fallback support to specify which fonts to fallback on when using complex (or multiple) languages in a report and a font may not work with all characters.
• Extremely fast.

More about the various PDF-specific features can be reviewed in our documentation: ActiveReports PDF Docs

Also keep in mind that licensing is only per developer, so you don't have any restrictions on how many users you deploy to or how many users use it concurrently on the server. Completely royalty free.

It is also easy to use for many people who are familiar with banded report writers like Microsoft Access or Crystal Reports since it uses the same general paradigm. The built-in designtime preview also allows you to immediately see the results while designing your report for pixel-perfect placement of controls.

If you or your end users prefer a report designer that is more page-based like the RDL designer in visual studio, we have a complete reporting package based on that report design paradigm as well. It has similarly comprehensive PDF features to ActiveReports. Check out Data Dynamics Reports for more info.

Scott Willeke
GrapeCity