Congratulations Ivan.

Regarding reporting, we have been using DevExpress Controls for about as long as we have been using Strataframe, but were using Crystal Reports (the version that came with visual studio) for our reporting, mainly due to previous experience with it. We had intended to examine xtraReports when we had a bit of time.

Recently we upgraded to Visual Studio 2010, only to find that Crystal reports is only available as a seperate download currently in beta and without a client distributable. Furthermore in the Terminal Services environment we are targeting it is no longer free. This led us to quickly convert to XrtaReports, and have been very happy with the results. There is nothing we have found that Crystal Reports could do that XrtaReports can't. Where we were stuck on how to achive what we wanted, the support from Devexpress was excellent.

We found that the best way to handle things was to create a bo mapped to a view. We use the same view to create a dataset for the XtraReports designer, then we use the following to get the data from the bo into the report

The key point here is that xtraReports is very fussy in that if a report is designed from a dataset, then that is what it expect to get its data from.

Cheers,

Peter

Thanks a lot Edhy!

Hi Charles. I have been trying to decide which Report Writer to go for and have narrowed it down to either Activereports or Xtrareports.

I was tending towards Activereports as , without additional licenses or expense, you can include a run time report designer for the end user. You seem to be suggesting that that can also be done with Xtrarports....did I pick this up correctly.

Also , would be interested if anybody has seen any feature by feature comaprison of the two. ActiveReports seems to be more expensive .

Hi Bill -



What strategy are you using for the data? It seems at first glance that using the BBS approach and creating the properties for child tables etc is not really necessary. I am tempted to use standard datasets, filled from parameterized SQL views and just by-passing SF for reporting data needs. If I go that route am I going to be missing something I'll wish I had?



Second question : do you have the whole dxExperience subscription or a separate XtraReports suite? Does this include WPF and Silverlight?



It looks like no further license is needed to give the end-user report design functionality. Is this the case?



( see what you started - I'm sure I'm going to have a lot of questions going forward. )



TIA



Charles

I've been using DevEx XtraReports for several years...even before SF. It has been quite enjoyable to use.



Bill

Well, welcome to the club



Congratulations in advance wishing you and wife to be the best!!!!

Edhy Rijo

Yep, you got it.

Hi Charles,



Any comment on the PDF stuff Above?

Edhy Rijo

That is interesting that you like XtraReports. I have been trying to decide between Telerik and DevExpress but I think I will go with DevExpress too if for no other reasons than you gave I know I can find at least one other person on the forum who uses it.



Thanks

Russ Brown (Using C#2010/SQL Server 2008)

I let me RSS subscription lapse as well. Xtrareports - even if you buy it separately from their big bundle of everything with source and priority support for $1300 is $350 and includes client side report designer and works with WPF, Silverlight, ASP and Winforms as far as I can tell . It really looks like the report tool VS should have had built in.