CODEWITHSUNDEEP
c#asp.net
Superman
Superman

Reputation: 3784

ASP.Net reporting framework

I am looking for an easy way to develop a reporting website which creates professional looking tables from linq to sql queries. I have some obvious bare bones asp.net sites running which just bind datatables to query results which generally works, but with the many new varieties of ASP.Net out (MVC, Web Apps, Ajax, Templates etc) I was wondering if there was a better way, or perhaps a place to look for simple templates to fill in.

Upvotes: 0

Views: 1480

Answers (1)

Basic
Basic

Reputation: 26766

The Microsoft reporting control can be hosted in MVC2 but it requires a bit of cajoling. This isn't required for installing in a standard Webforms site.

That said, Microsoft reporting is absolutely useless if you want to access data via Entity Framework or if using your own BL/DAL. In our case, we've had to put dummy connection strings in web.config to allow the designer to work and then trick it into loading something via our Business Logic.

Also, the charts are very "Excel 2000"

Crystal Reports is said to be Superior but I haven't tried it (We Use MVC2 and .Net 4 - When we investigated reporting, Crystal hadn't yet released their .Net 4 VS2010 edition)

Telerik Reporting seems to be VERY Slick. This is actually something we're looking at using ourselves in future. It's a little pricey but behind the scenes it seems to be very sensibly built with good charting support and an intelligent way of handling reports (treating them as objects rather than files like MS RDLCs)

That said, I've only used the Trial for Telerik so it may have issues we haven't found yet.

Beyond that, there are a ton of controls out there but we found that a lot didn't support MVC2 very well.

If you don't care what the actual website is, I'd suggest WebForms for compatibility reasons. You may also want to look into Silverlight / Flash report viewers (Depends on userbase as to whether it's feasible to use plugins).

You may also need to investigate getting parameters into report queries - Are the params going to be handled by your BL/Repository/Dal/EF/??? or by the report engine itself (effectively filtering). The latter is usually easier to configure but results in pulling more info from the Db than is necessarily required.

As you can see, I don't have a definitive answer, just some things we've found out while solving a similar problem.

Hope it helped

Upvotes: 2

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