Daily Archives: February 1, 2004

A thought about Reporting Services / Crystal/ Active Reports

Tools

My client and I are getting ready to start sharing reports via the web with clients.

These are the same reports we have in windows apps (VB6 and Winforms).

I want to generate the reports dynamically because there will be so many. There are thousands of clients (though only maybe 50 active at a time) and each client could have a number of projects and depending on the type of project, a *huge* variety of possible reports to choose from. We looked at this a few years ago with a company that had a whole management front end written that would juggle pdf or other doc types. But we would have had to export and send every single report for every single client. Egads. Dynamic generation please

So I seem to have these choices

Reporting Services
Win/Web Report Design: Web reports created with Microsoft’s VS.NET based design tool
Still need to create my Windows reports with Crystal or ActiveReports
Management: built in
If we keep our current set up of webserver and sql server on the same box, we are golden with no extra licensing fees

Crystal Reports (this link may come as a surprise to some…)
Win/Web Report Design: Likely will get two for one creating report that can be viewed in WinForms or ASP.NET
Management:Will have to write my own asp.net app for report management
$$: Pay through the nose to license Crystal for use on the web

ActiveReports
Win/Web Report Design:Two for one report creation for Winforms/ASP.NET
Management:Will have to write my own asp.net app for report management
$$: Affordable Licensing

Other thoughts

I can easily have an ASP.NET front end to get at a report and a WinForms front end to get at the same report.

But I have a lot of pro/con weighing to do now.

I’d be curious to hear from anyone who has gone through this thought process to solve this same type of problem…

Casey Chesnut’s weblog

Just Rambling

4/14/04: Now he tells me: I misspelled Casey’s last name in the title and below and am correcting it for google’s sake. But my misspelling, for those of you who came here for the laugh was “Chestnut“.

I haven’t looked at Casey Chesnut’s weblog in a long time. Not since I was fiddling with doing some work on the pocket pc for a client but that turned into a tablet/laptop app.

Don Box recently pointed to Casey’s blog. I have been looking around there. I have a sinking feeling after looking at what he is doing which is something along the lines of wondering who I think I’m kidding sometimes when writing about the things I am learning. This guy is damned smart and he doesn’t have to work too hard for it to show.

I am so unfocused – one day trying to rebuild my server, another day playing with ink controls, the next day looking at wse2 the next day Whidbey bits and then Lonestar and  around and over and under and back and forth. And all in between trying to do my own work, etc.  I don’t get a chance to stick with any one thing long enough and I am looking at just too many things at once. Not sure where I am going with this thought. Part of me (and everyone I know) says I need a major vacation. But then of course I’ll only fall further behind.

(Subscribed of course.)