Hi Folks,

We're developing a web app to be used by lots of companies (we hope ).

This means a companie can put in the data, work with it and wants reports. We would predefine reports which they can than generate based on criteria they put in.

Crystal I would think, or Microsoft Reporting Services 2005... First costs >600 euro per company that uses the application (which is not possible since it's a montly fee based app) and the second only works with IE >5.5, while the whole app is designed to work in most browsers (Going from IE, FireFox, Safari, Mac IE, etc..)

Who has a good alternative royalty free or, not to expense (> 50 euro per client).

Any advice would be greatly apperciated

I haven't used it but someone I know swears by ActiveReports (http://www.datadynamics.com/).

I haven't used datadynamics either, but I've heard good things about it. It would be my second hand recommendation.

gabrielk wrote:

Hi Folks,

We're developing a web app to be used by lots of companies (we hope ).

This means a companie can put in the data, work with it and wants reports. We would predefine reports which they can than generate based on criteria they put in.

Crystal I would think, or Microsoft Reporting Services 2005... First costs >600 euro per company that uses the application (which is not possible since it's a montly fee based app) and the second only works with IE >5.5, while the whole app is designed to work in most browsers (Going from IE, FireFox, Safari, Mac IE, etc..)

Who has a good alternative royalty free or, not to expense (> 50 euro per client).

Any advice would be greatly apperciated

With reporting services. You could always tell the server to render the report to PDF then return that to the browser would would launch adobe reader. Also, VS 2005 includes report controls so you can use SQL Reporting services without a server.

I think there is a royalty free option with Crystal now, isn't there?

I have heard good things about Active Reports as already suggested.

Another one you might want to look into is Dev Express's http://www.devexpress.com/Products/NET/XtraReports/ . I haven't used them but I have used other of their products and they are always well done.

BOb

I can vouch for ActiveReports. Great tool and very well (with some caveats) integrated. I haven't used it in a web environment, but I believe it's relatively straightforward. And no distribution fees, even for the end-user report designer control.

Jeff...

We are using ActiveReports for a while now and I prefer it over CrystalReports. If you plan to supply the end-user designer to the customer, then it may be worth to take a look at the Stimulsoft reporting tool (http://www.stimulsoft.com). Their tool has similar features as active reports, but a much better end-user designer. But how it behaves in production situations i can't tell since we have only done some small tests.