We have been using .Net and Visual Studio for the last six years, and early on developed a number of web based reporting applications using the .Net version of Crystal Reports that was bundled with Visual Studio. I'm unimpressed with that product: It seems incredibly difficult and convoluted to use. We had to make security changes, install various extra software, and so on.
Now, we are moving to VS2008 and version 3.5 of the .Net framework, and the time has come to redevelop old applications. Our Crystal .Net developers are long gone and I face a decision: Do we stick with Crystal or move to something else? We have the "full" version of Crystal Reports XI at our disposal.
We produce PDF versions of data extracted from various databases. Some apps use the built-in Report Viewer but this seems redundant with the flexibility of grid views. We still need to produce printable PDFs in the grid or in a downloadable Excel format.
- Is Crystal Reports .Net worth persisting with, or should we work out how to use version XI?
- Alternatively is there a simple and low cost way to generate PDF reports without using Crystal?
Best Answer
I have experience with reporting in CrystalReports (trying lite version bundled with Visual Studio), ActiveReports from DataDynamics (4 years, full version), Reporting from Telerik (trying trial version) and XtraReports from DevExpress (last one year).
I think ( and not only me :) ), the CrystalReports are most uneficient tool ( developer productivity ) from this tools. The DataDynamics are much, much more better, bud is littlebit buggy :(. Last year we decided to change reporting suite - we have choosen a XtraReports ( with source code ), and I'm totaly happy. The price is little, no bugs ( to now :) ), wonderfull support, and ( the most important ) the productivity was grown a lot.
I recomend you DevExpress's or Telerik's reporting tools.