I have been working in SSRS 2008 r2 to produce some complex reports. it seems to meet 80% of our reporting requirements. However, when it comes down to more complex reports, it turns into some pain in the back side really.
I need to generate a sort of advance Gantt view in SSRS. RangeBar char is suggested to be used for Gantt scenarios. But it did not seem to meet my requirement as I need more customizability .
I was just wondering whether there is any opensource or paid solution for advance gantt reports in ssrs.
I had a deep search on the internet and could not find more interesting really.
Your help would be appreciated.
I am not aware of any third party plug ins (Surprisingly). However there is an excellent article on this on SQL Server Central:
http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Reporting+Services+(SSRS)/Santa+gets+an+RDL+present/61782/
It would take a lot of setting up and uses in built SSRS controls (RangeBar Chart) but it is a free solution. SSRS is a great tool for displaying and manipulating report based information, however it does lack in areas for granularity and customisation.
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I am developing an application which will have a WPF interface and a Silverlight/Azure implementation
So I'm looking to invest in a control suit that will require as little repeat work for the two UI implementations. The DataGrid must be top-notch as well as integration with an MVVM development model. Also important - reporting in various formats such as excel and pdf.
Support quality an active user community are important obviously.
All inputs and comments are welcome!
Having used several different control suites across multiple platforms, I would happily recommend Telerik as it is the one we keep coming back to.
They have a massive online community and support is very good. A key factor for us was availability of source code as we often develop app for clients requiring full access to all source.
I'd recommend DevExpress based on experience with their support team, even their CTO replies to questions sometimes.
I'm looking to build a reporting portal on top of our database which is SQL Server 2008 R2.
It's been suggested that I use SSRS, and I've played around with it for a few hours. I found it very easy to point it to a table and have it generate a table/graphs for you. It could all be done in a few minutes, and that's great.
I had a hard time customizing the report to make it look nice. I thought it was like using Word to design a website, the customization was pretty limited. I have experience in web development using ASP.NET with jQuery, and I'm currently thinking that I could make the portal much faster if I could use my experience with those technologies.
I'd like to get advice on which path is best for my project.
Queries to the db are fairly simple, but not trivial. I have no problem building the data and business layers myself by using Linq-to-Sql.
I do not need print support
I need an emailing system that sends out reports every day, which I can also build myself (it doesn't need to let users subscribe to reports)
Don't need the flexibility of having users create their own reports. This is only for 2-3 different reports.
I enjoy the development experience using web technologies and feel comfortable building a pleasant user experience with jQuery and plugins. I fear that using SSRS, I would be limited to something ugly and not "fun" to use.
I want this project to be up in 2-3 weeks. I can't afford to re-invent the wheel for everything, but I also don't want to spend most of my time asking questions like "how do I make a fade-in effect in ssrs?"
How easy is it to customize the UI? Are there good examples online of what can be achieved? Does SSRS have some advantage that I could hardly get by writing my custom solution? I'm thinking in terms of application performance and overall functionality.
Thanks for your input.
I have built custom web interface to a suite of SSRS reports. You can easily do this, and submit the gathered report parameters to Reporting Services, and have it render the generated report to a web page, all as if the user had used the SSRS interface to begin with.
Some comments i would make:
let SSRS handle the reporting side of things. It has all the power and features you could need. And its free. And tested. And extensible. And renders to multiple (printable) formats.
you could maybe look at buying a set of controls designed to be used with SSRS to get even nicer chart output
you can build your own (parameter gathering & report triggering) interface within three weeks, but the schedule will be tight
you can't use jQuery within the rendered reports. A lot of the HTML within the rendered report is hardcoded template type code (styles etc are embedded into the report rather than linking to an external file)
you don't need jQuery fade-in panels to make your reports pretty :)
So, as you know SSRS allows web and winforms output, printing, and all that. But your users will undoubtedly end up bugging your for PDF and Excel exporting, which is also built-in.
It's also a lot easier to edit the reports without having to alter your app and as you mentioned it has the emailing built in.
SSRS is quite powerful if you play around with the grouping and parameterization. The designer is a little clunky as you make more complicated reports, but I've always been able to design what I want. I've not used Crystal Reports but presumably it's even more powerful but it is another thing to learn and obtain.
I use 2 main reporting tools (Business Objects and SSRS) and also Microsoft Access. I can honestly say that I prefer SSRS for 95% of the work I do. The users really like all the drill through options you can do. For example lets say you have a chart showing widgets sold, you can click on that bar of the bar graph and have it drill to a report showing a breakdown of which widgets were sold.
This ability of going from a “high level” to low level detail is really powerful to the users. As for looks, I quite like the default controls that ship with report builder 3.0, they have come a long way and just look what is around the corner with project crescent
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/sqlrsteamblog/archive/2010/11/09/a-glimpse-at-project-crescent.aspx
I know it's probably not a WEB-BASED technology but I would definitely give Crystal Reports a try. Specially considering your time constraints...
Is it possible to embed the Visual Studio 2010 report designer functionality into my WPF application?
Initially I was considering the use of Report builder, but for providing ad-hoc reporting capability from within application, I need to teach users too many steps before they start creating a simple report. So I am now thinking of simplifying it by embedding the report Designer (if it is possible), and do all the basic steps programatically and show the design surface and Data objects on the left.
Any help is appreciated.
I have not found any good way so far and decided to use Report Builder instead. The approach I took is to build a report skeleton programtically with connection and query embedded in the RDL to expose object model instead of tables and views and launching the Report Builder to open this RDL. Yes.. there is lot of overhead that I need to build a query with lot of unnecessary fields and joins and the resulting performance is terrible. In a future version I will come up asking the users the fields they need to use int he report to improve performance.
Looks like Microsoft is going to make customers pay for SSRS from 2012 version. So this choice of use SSRS may even b ruled out.
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I'm working on a small project that requires some of our users to be able to view/sort/filter and generally play around with a large amount of data. It's based on a sql server 2000 view and is something on the order of 125k rows worth of historical event data (think sports).
Normally I would turn to excel for this kind of simple manipulation, but the version of excel we use doesn't support more than 65k rows (2003). I've thought of access, but on the surface the interface seems a bit complicated.
Does anyone know of a good tool to allow these users to quickly perform these kinds of operations?
Honestly, if you're confident you could implement a solution quickly (lets say 1 hour) with excel 2007. Consider that Office 2007 costs ~ $500, and whatever your hourly rate is (lets just say $50 for kicks), then you would need to build something within 10 hours and anything over that you'd be better off going and buying Office 2007.
10 hours, that's less than 2 days of dev time. And the $500 price tag is for a new copy of office, not the upgrade version.
Sounds like it's time to upgrade.
BTW, here are some numbers of Excel 2007 limitations.
Report Builder 2.0 is an easy to use tool for creating reports.
If you install Sql Server Express 2008, you get Reporting Services for free.
This will work till you hit the size limit for Sql Express, I believe 4GB of data.
what about an intranet site?
Take a look at ASP.NET Dynamic Data websites. You should be able to create a basic site in an hour or less. They even look good out of the box.
And your users may be "dumb" but you're working for them!
A Crystal Report is not bad if you set it up with the right filters, which the users can control.
Then you can either embed in an intranet site (very easy w/visual studio), or let them view it locally with the free viewer.
If you're already using SQL server, try installing SQL server reporting services (SSRS). it allows you to quickly generate reports for your users and publish them on a web interface, or it even has a plugin for the browser called a Report Builder, which allows users to create their own reports. If the users are proficient in excel, then Report Builder would be an easy jump for them to make.
Create a small windows app, having just 1 gridview on it, with sorting / paging etc. enabled?
If you end up doing some sort of website, check out the Google visualization API for some really spiffy graphs and charts.
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Is there a way to easily convert Crystal Reports reports to Reporting Services RDL format?
We have quite a few reports that will be needing conversion soon.
I know about the manual process (which is basically rebuilding all your reports from scratch in SSRS), but my searches pointed to a few possibilities with automatic conversion "acceleration" with several consulting firms. (As described on .... - link broken).
Do any of you have any valid experiences or recomendations regarding this particular issue?
Are there any tools around that I do not know about?
I have searched previously for this, with no luck. There does not seem to be any tools available for this conversion, the manual method thereby becomes the only method. And yes, there are consulting firms who will do the manual work for you, but they still do it manually.
Crystal Reports and Reporting Services have different architectural styles, making it a difficult task for a conversion tool, so I view it as unlikely that someone will build one anytime soon.
I work for one of those consulting firms mentioned by Carlton, and let me tell you that we are the only company to have developed an in-house (proprietary) tool that helps us jump start the conversion process from RPTs to RDLs. Our current tool only supports Crystal Rpts 9 and older, and the RDL 2000 and 2005 formats.
I have done several of these conversion projects myself, and there are lots of things that cannot be automatically converted due to the nature of each product. Things like expressions, data source information, and dataset queries just cannot be automagically "translated" by a tool.
Cheers.
An alternative would be to use a much cheaper reporting solution which can read Crystal Reports templates, such as (our very own) Java-based i-net Clear Reports (used to be i-net Crystal-Clear).
Note that unlike most solutions, we do NOT lose information such as data source information, formulas, SQL expressions, etc. from the original templates. Even charts are converted quite well.
Also, we now offer a fully functional, free report designer (which can also run reports).
My original VB code was converted to C#. See RptToXml.
We're in a very similar situation at the moment. Dozens of crystal reports in place and we're shifting to Reporting Services (mainly for its ease of deployment and more flexible UI for the end user) - our solution is to leave them be, but anything new is being created in RptgSvcs. Ideally we'd translate them, but the .rpt format is too opaque.
In my search I got to know a product of KTL Solutions with the name KTL Crystal Converter which is capable of converting a Crystal report to SSRS.
As suggested by Microsoft you may try any of the following migration tools for SAP Crystal Reports to SSRS conversion:
Hitachi Consulting http://www.hitachiconsulting.com/page.cfm?ID=bi
TCS http://www.tcs.com/Microsoft2005Launch/download/Microsoft_Recast.pdf
Sonata Software Ltd. http://microsoftcc.sonata-software.com/html/mcc_bi.htm
KTL Solutions http://www.ktlsolutions.com/t-crystalconverter.aspx
90DegreeSoftware http://www.90degreesoftware.com
Jeff-Net http://www.rpttosql.com/index.html
Neudesic http://www.neudesic.com
PLUS-IT http://www.plus-it.de