Looking into some Reporting Tools - Janus Pienaar

Janus Pienaar

Made in South Africa

Looking into some Reporting Tools

We had a requirement at work to look into a few reporting tools that would suite our business needs.

I looked into the following:

1. SQL Reporting
2. Crystal Reports
3. ComponentOne Reports
4. Active Reports for .Net

And off course it had to meet some of our requirements, like:

1. Change page orientation - SQL  Reporting doesn't support this.
2. Support sub reports
3. Set the datasource at runtime
4. Support continuation pages.
5. Support hyperlinks to create drill-down reports
6. Simple and easy to use report designer.

After examining (if i may call it that) all of the above I found that ActiveReports will be best to use.

I only played around with it for a couple of hours, but this is an awesome tool and the pricing, at $499, isn't bad at all.

Have a look at http://www.datadynamics.com/Products/ProductOverview.aspx?Product=ARNET

If someone has come accross any other reporting tools, please let me know, as I have not yet made a final decision.

Posted: Nov 09 2004, 02:47 PM by janus | with 2 comment(s)
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Comments

Stuart Gunter said:

Oh it really is a small world we live in!

Just finished readying Ilo's article on sadeveloper about looking for a reporting tool, and our clients are busy doing that too!

We've used ActiveReports quite a lot, and I'm yet to be disappointed. They cover everything really really well! The only consideration is that they must be hosted in an application. SQL RS (and Crystal, as far as I know) can be hosted in their own platform, which does give a certain level of versatility when deploying reports to management. Many management users do not actually log into any live systems to run reports, but would prefer scheduled reports, etc. This is a big consideration for us right now.

I'm pushing for SQL RS, because even though it has a few minor issues, I still feel it outweights the cost and effort involved in using other solutions.

Obviously I don't know your business case, so you will only know the important factors that must be taken into consideration.

Good luck though! Let me know what you decide!
# November 9, 2004 4:14 PM

Ilo said:

Janus,
In the article Stuart is referring to, I have some contact details of reporting vendors, if it might help.

http://www.sadeveloper.net/Articles_View.aspx?articleID=245

# November 10, 2004 7:51 AM
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