Reporting in .Net

[Justin Wilcox]

Hey gang,

Any recommendations out there for web reporting in .net?  We currently use SQL Reporting services to enable users to create/export reports on our website, but building those reports is cumbersome and they don't end up looking particularly good.  The feature is set is also beginning to feel stale.

Anyone have good experiences with a another reporting framework that makes pretty reports?  The cheaper/freer the better, but we're open.

Thanks,

Justin

[Erick Thompson]

If it's online reports, I would suggest Silverlight. With the controls in the toolbox, there are a ton of cool/pretty reports you could put together. I don't know of any reporting infrastructure, but it may not be too difficult if each report == a URL.

 

Erick

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[Jeff Schumacher]

Check out Telerik's reporting product, it's designed pretty well. http://www.telerik.com/products/reporting.aspx.  DevExpress, and ActiveReports have some nice stuff too.  Any of these are better than SQL reporting.  My biggest client is all about reporting, so we've spent years building our own reporting platform (I don't recommend this).

Whatever you do, stay far far away from Crystal Reports.  Not only will it cost your soul, but you'll leave with scars.

Jeff

On Wed, Jan 6, 2010 at 1:01 PM, Justin Wilcox <just...@gmail.com> wrote:

[Ronald Woan]

Internal or external users? How much flexibility do you want to
provide users will generally dictate whether you can afford to roll
you own (charting components and datagrids standard in Silverlight and
other frameworks) or need a framework. Also how understandable to
those users is the data schema?

We used SQL Server Reporting Services extensively at Azaleos but we
only allowed users to change parameters, and we did a lot of work to
make them look good in terms of generating design elements, etc... We
also use it to handle scheduled and subscribed report. We chose it
originally because it came out of the box, but it turned out when we
moved from Salesforce to Dynamics, that other MS products build on it
such that we were able to integrate our existing reports into Dynamics
easily. Dynamics thankfully had its own more user friendly report
construction for data in its model. For more adhoc reporting, we
allowed Excel access to OLAP cubes we generated for the purpose as we
could be relatively sure people couldn't tank the system and would get
what they wanted quickly.

SQL Server 2008 R2 stuff looks much improved:

http://blogs.technet.com/dataplatforminsider/archive/2009/11/09/announcing-the-sql-server-2008-r2-november-ctp.aspx

No experience but a bunch of stuff is commercially available:

http://www.componentsource.com/features/reporting/javascript-ajax/index.html

Ron

[Justin Wilcox]

Thanks for everyone's input - terrific stuff and very helpful.  After taking a look around and reading more on up on the planned 2008 R2 updates, my gut is we'll probably stick with SQL Reporting services; just need to spend some more time makin um purdy I suppose. Looks like we've gotten spoiled by Excel's auto-formatting features.

Btw, I really like the idea of exposing OLAP cubes via Excel for the users who can handle organizing their own data.  These are internal reports.

For anyone else interested, Fusion Charts (http://www.fusioncharts.com/) have some really great looking and interactive Flash charting components.

Thanks again,

Justin

[Ted Neward]

So which is worse—losing your soul, or the scars left behind? :-)

 

Ted Neward

Java, .NET, XML Services

Consulting, Teaching, Speaking, Writing

http://www.tedneward.com