April 13, 2022 at 7:50 pm
Hello,
Our company has made heavy use of Crystal Reports over the years. Unfortunately, SAP doesn't appear to be giving much attention toward improving the product, and we're finding it difficult to embed Crystal Reports within our .NET apps.
I've been looking at SSRS, which is often championed as an alternative. My first impression is that, from an ease-of-use standpoint, it is extremely awkward and clunky. It seems fine for designing simple reports that consist of simple grids with columns on top and rows on bottom. But many of the reports we develop require us to be able to show the data with more flexibility than that (invoices, picking lists, etc...). It may be a case of me needing to spend more time with the tool to see what can be done with it.
I'm looking for any testimonials about tools you've used for creating paginated reports. If you feel like SSRS is the right tool for this, I'd be interested in your thoughts.
Thanks!
April 13, 2022 at 8:25 pm
I liked Telerik reports when I was using it a few years ago. I haven't used it, but generally see good comments on DevExpress. Both appear to be maintained for .NET Core/Standard.
I want to like SSRS, but the design tooling is a bit clunky, and at least to me, reports usually feel ponderously slow.
April 28, 2022 at 8:09 pm
Thanks for the suggestions ratbak! I'm doing the free trial of Telerik now. It seems a bit more limited than Crystal in terms of functionality, and some aspects of it seem to require developer skills and .NET programming, but I'll stick with it a bit longer to see if it can get the job done.
May 6, 2022 at 3:29 pm
SSRS RDLs are definitely a bit quirky and difficult to master but they are extremely flexible. I use Visual Studio 2017 to design RDLs and would recommend that over the built-in "Report Builder" app. RDLs are fully programmable and use visual basic to drive "expressions" that let you do just about anything you might need to. You can do complex grouping, sorting, filtering, sub-reports, etc. You can include parameters driven by pulldown menus.
In general I would rate the SSRS product as very much easier to work with than Crystal Reports / Crystal Server, and almost infinitely easier to install and support.
If you have access to an online technical training platform, there are tons of instructional videos / courses that can help you get a head start.
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