Crystal Reports .Net Guidance

Question

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?

Answer 1

We use Crystal in our shop too. We are currently on 8.5, which is way old and is no longer supported by SAP. We tried to upgrade to CRXI recently, which involved an entirely new API. We had to shelf the effort due to other priorities. While working on the upgrade I found support for CRXI on a number of forums. Google it.

I believe you can find a cheap way to generate PDFs without using Crystal. I believe Adobe gives the creation part away for free. I would visit their site and look into it.

I would recommend staying with Crystal only if you had a lot of reports that were already using that technology.

Answer 2

Move away from CR: just get a good PDF generator and Excel engine for .NET, and feed those using your own database code. You can use all the powerful .NET features, including LINQ, without having to wrestle with the Crystal Reports runtime and its woefully inadequate documentation and support.

Answer 3

I have used ActiveReports from DataDynamics and Crystal Reports. Of these two, I would recommend ActiveReports above Crystal based on ease of use and, more importantly, future maintenance.

Answer 4

I would recommended i-net Clear Reports (used to be i-net Crystal-Clear). It can read your existing *.rpt files. Has a better and easier-to-use API (which I admit is not saying much...).

Answer 5

Like you, I've had poor experiences with Crystal Reports, and my gut instinct is to post "avoid it at all costs" in all caps with lots of exclamation points. However, I've had my afternoon nap today, so I'll post like a grownup.

If all you're looking to do is pdf-ize (yes, it's a real word, damnit!) then you might look into some of the PDF widgets like ABCPDF and the like. It's relatively easy to pop a well-formatted web page into a PDF document and be done with it.

However, if you need tight report formatting, consider sticking with crystal reports -- you have a big investment and knowledge base in the technology. Or, alternately, you could switch to ActiveReports or SQL Server reporting services.

I guess the cost/benefit analysis is the cost of retraining your dev team, and investing in the new technologies.

Answer 6

Get out of Crystal Reports. They are poor.

Check out SQL Reporting Services. It works very well with .NET. Try it out. There is a learning curve, but when is there not?