Which reporting tool should I use for win application in vb.net

Dear Sir,

I am in confusion, to use reporting tool between report viewer and crystal report. I ma developing a application in visual studio 2010 and database engine SQL Server 2005. Now I want to generate report through tools. but I can't determine which tool I should use plz. tell me and why I should use the tool rather than other.

Thanking You

Debasis Bag

In my experience, Crystal Reports has never let me down.

Crystal Report is easier for reporting generating and convert to other file formats like PDF, Excel, Word, I am fond in Crystal Report

Personally I hate Crystal reports, I used it years ago for a while and thought it was just a big P.I.T.A. I started using Active Reports from Data Dynamics back in VB5 and in VB6 and thought it was awesome. I could do reports in 1/10th the time it took in Crystal and the process was totally logical as it pretty much behaves just like any other VB object. Fields have a .Text property which you can change or read on the fly just like any VB form and many other such things.

I do not have the .Net version yet so I have not been able to try it but I will most likely buy it when I need to create reports in Vb.Net.

That said Active Reports is not cheap but it is worth every penny.
http://www.datadynamics.com/Products.../Overview.aspx

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Originally Posted by Product overview snippet

ActiveReports is the world's most flexible reporting tool for .NET. It offers an extensive code-behind, event-based API for report creation, plus the ability to hook into pretty much any reporting behavior at run time. Developers have long used ActiveReports to embed advanced reporting features into their applications — features that would otherwise be considered impossible to achieve. Read our case studies to discover how ActiveReports has turned reporting into a competitive advantage for our clients.

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Personally after using this tool for 15 years I would not consider anything else.

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Originally Posted by Debasis Bag

Dear Sir,

I am in confusion, to use reporting tool between report viewer and crystal report. I ma developing a application in visual studio 2010 and database engine SQL Server 2005. Now I want to generate report through tools. but I can't determine which tool I should use plz. tell me and why I should use the tool rather than other.
Debasis Bag

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All reporting tools are good
Try with Crystal Reports, it's easy to learn, it comes with the VS
It will reduce your design & developing time
You'll find tons of help in case you have problems
Later with time and after you try others reporting tools and compare them, then, you'll take your own decision

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Originally Posted by jggtz

Try with Crystal Reports, it's easy to learn, it comes with the VS

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Just a note, and a slight pain about Crystal Reports for VS 2010. It doesn't come with VS 2010 onwards anymore. You can however download it from SAP Business objects. It is not too big, but still, downloading it separately put me off a bit.

One of the things I hated about Crystal in the past was the way it works with data, It just seemed so alien the way you make connections, do the query then assign the data to the fields and heaven forbic that you need to add a field to the database and put in on the report after the report was designed or if you needed to run a different query at runtime than what you did in the designer. Maybe they have changed things since the last time I used it, I don't know.

I do know the last time I used it I had to creat 12 reports for a project and it took a full day to do them in Crystal. The customer then decided they needed another field both in the database and on the report and there was no choice but to delete the existing reports and create new ones which took most of a day again.

Using active reports for that same project required 1 report instead of 12 and the report used 12 different queries that were built on the fly through VB code and took less than 2 hours the very first time using AR after getting familar with the program it could be done in 30 minutes. In yet another project I have 2 reports designed that end up being over 100 in the final program due to different queries and field mapping in the code.

The wosrt parts about Crystal is that you need to learn how to do it in Crystal. The best part about Active reports is that if you know how to get the data in VB then you already know how to do it in Active Reports as you can simply set the recordset of the report to any recordset you have opened in your code, you can hide or show fields, you can map them to any thing in your recordset or even make them static through code just like if you were working with a form or grid in VB.

Another really huge plus with AR is that it allows you to include a report designer in your program so your end users can create thier own reports within your program if needed and of course it also allows you to easily export the report to several different popular formats.

I have used several reporting tools prior to finding AR and none of them are even close.

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Originally Posted by DataMiser

Personally I hate Crystal reports, I used it years ago for a while and thought it was just a big P.I.T.A. I started using Active Reports from Data Dynamics back in VB5 and in VB6 and thought it was awesome. I could do reports in 1/10th the time it took in Crystal and the process was totally logical as it pretty much behaves just like any other VB object. Fields have a .Text property which you can change or read on the fly just like any VB form and many other such things.

I do not have the .Net version yet so I have not been able to try it but I will most likely buy it when I need to create reports in Vb.Net.

That said Active Reports is not cheap but it is worth every penny.
http://www.datadynamics.com/Products.../Overview.aspx



Personally after using this tool for 15 years I would not consider anything else.

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I will second that. I bought my copy of Active Reports about a year ago. Worth every penny. I develop everything using VS2008 Std / SQL Server 2008 R2 and Active Reports 6. Fantastic combination.

-Max