I was wondering what tools some of you use for reporting, specifically in windows form applications. For example, Crystal Reports, Active Reports, etc. SQL Reporting Services doesn't count, as you cannot package it with an application. I have alot of reports to create and I'm trying to find the most dynamic and economical approach. Creating each report in a designer seems quite tedious.

More dynamic reporting tools not automatically leads to shorter development times. In my experience, the time you spend less on the designer, if compensated by the extra time you need on coping with the increased complexity, maintaining catalogs and configurations.

For simple reports, you will need to ask if your customer really needs then as a report. In many cases a display on screen using a grid component like the ones from DevExpress, infragistics or Janus will do. You can always export to excel.

For more advanced reports you will need another tool. I prefer to keep the programming model as close as possible to that of the total application. For this reason we choose Active Reports over Crystal Reports. There are tools that can be more dynamically configured, but most of then are BI-tools and integrate badly with an application.

wvnoort wrote:

For more advanced reports you will need another tool. I prefer to keep the programming model as close as possible to that of the total application. For this reason we choose Active Reports over Crystal Reports. There are tools that can be more dynamically configured, but most of then are BI-tools and integrate badly with an application.

I agree with wvnoort most of the way. In our case we've saved a ton of time by going with Active Reports as it supports (through a hack) inheritance of reports (not visual inheritance, mind you) that allowed us a good deal of code reuse. Active Reports is xcopy deployable; the newest version in beta supports binding to IList objects; the current version can be late-bound to datasets; and overall, it's just a very "programmable" reporting package. I recommend it if you require any level of real integration into your application. Plus, there are no royalty costs for distributing the end-user designer control.

Jeff...

I think you should have a look at DeveloperExpress's XtraReports. At fraction of ActiveReport's price it offers virtually all its functionality and parallels Access's reports design approach in ease of use (It even has the same wizards as Access to get you started with any report and a very powerful LABEL wizard report that covers 1500+ standard labels).. It can bind to IList and its grouping and sub-report functionality is un-paralleled. You can even drop any WiunForm control and it will gladly print it (including all DevExpress's own WinForms controls like their Tree control and even their Grid control).

Its a brease to use and all my team loves it. My newest team member managed to learn it and produce reports in 30 minutes flat...

I LOVE IT

Has anyone heard of or used Report Sharp-Shooter from 9rays.net? http://www.9rays.net/cgi-bin/components.cgi?act=1&cid=93

I'll be looking for a reporting tool in a couple of months and want to make sure I get a good one.

Try the report client in Visual Studio 2005.

DotNetShannon wrote:

I was wondering what tools some of you use for reporting, specifically in windows form applications. For example, Crystal Reports, Active Reports, etc. SQL Reporting Services doesn't count, as you cannot package it with an application. I have alot of reports to create and I'm trying to find the most dynamic and economical approach. Creating each report in a designer seems quite tedious.

FYI: If you are using VS 2005 it includes reporting controls that allow you to run SQL Reporting without having a reporting services server. So, the same reports can run server side or client side.

BOb