Free alternatives to ReportViewer - report

In my applications I need to produce two different types of reports.
- one business object per page reports where actual data is written inside appropriate placeholders
- tabular reports spanning multiple pages using grouping and summary rows.
At the moment I' m using ReportViewer, but I'm looking for free alternatives.
I found some similar questions like this Alternative to reportViewer , but they are a bit outdated, so in the mind-time new libraries / products may be available.

In case you are finding some open source and free reporting tools then you should see fyiReporting.For further details please see this question and this one as well where you can also find some open source reporting tools for .net.iTextSharp also worth to try

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Converting Excel math to SQL in VBNet, ASP.NET web application

I am trying to automate a process that is currently done mainly with excel files. These files have been used for a while and are customized just how the user likes them. I am turning this into a data driven VB NEt application and now and at the task of configuring all the computed columns to do the equations the user's excel spread sheets are doing currently.
The main ones needed that I can't find information on are STANDARDIZE, PERCENTRANK and STDEVA (atleast for computed columns- I have seen STEVA used in select queries)
Excuse me if there is documentation on this I can refer to, I searched google and stackoverflow and wasn't able to find anything. If you could point me to any documentation like this that might exist- that would be a huge help!

MS Word template with loops, tables and charts

For our SaaS (LAMP) product reporting we are currently using JasperReports. We find it too cumbersome to develop reports with and the output in Word unworkable. Moreover, a couple of customers request to be able to develop simple reports themselves (to be used as mail merge). We would therefore like to develop templates right in Word. The idea is to have an application/webservice that would receive the Word template and JSON data from the LAMP application and return the filled-in report. The report has to support:
Loops inside content (repeating a document section several times while filling in array data)
Filling in tables (populating rows from array)
Filling in chart data in pre-created charts (from array)
This is the functionality we are using in JasperReports right now. Are there existing solutions to this? I've found quite a lot that can substitute simple variables, but no info about the the above three points. Will it be a lot of effort to write one from scratch? I would prefer a Windows OpenXML-based solution rather than a Linux PHPOffice-based one as I presume the former would handle the text split by spell-checker and language tags (though I'm not sure).
Windward and Docmosis are both commercial products that support the features you've listed and they are intended to be added to your application to provide reporting capabilities. Neither is are not OpenXML based. They can use Word documents as templates and perform the data merge into different output formats. Please note I work for Docmosis.
Aspose Words is another tool and it can populate a template but most of the power is through code rather than controls/directives in the template. Given your OpenXML thoughts, perhaps this is more what you are looking for.
More tools are recommended here in StackExchange.
I hope that helps.
ReportBox is a Web based reporting solution that can be used by any software application to generate documents and reports in Microsoft Word/ Excel/ PowerPoint/ HTML(DocX/Xlsx/PPTx/HTML) using OpenXML.
The process starts by building a Microsoft Word/ Excel/ PowerPoint/ HTML document as a template and uploading to ReportBox portal. Your application either sends data to ReportBox or ReportBox can pull data from your application database, which is then merged with the template to produce the finished report. Please note that I work for GreenThoughts.

Reporting platform for Asp.net - with excel/pdf/word export

I am looking for a reporting platform for our asp.net application, which will allow the report to be exported in excel (for tabular data), or PDF/Word (for document reports like Invoice prints).
Are there any standard options available?
I tried Rdlc, but it does not seem to help in the second case (at least I dint see a way, if you can please enlighten me :) ).
Currently we are using Interop for excel export (I know its not recommended for asp.net, we are planning to switch soon), use rtf templates for word reports (which also makes them somewhat customizable) and we dont have pdf export (planning to build it). But it seems like a waste of effort if standard controls are already available!
Cheaper the better! Free rocks!!
What's the issue with Rdlc? You can create any kind of format into it. For invoice prints etc you can use list data region. Its used for free flow kind of stuff. Its like ASP.NET repeater. In your case, you will have only one row of data.
Edit: even Crystal reports has equivalent functionality. As said, you will have only one row of data for invoices etc.
In both Crystal & RDLC, you can even supply multiple rows of data to your free flow report and generate multiple invoices in one go. Can be very helpful feature for users.

OLAP Web Visualization and Reporting Recommendations

I am preparing an offer for a customer. They proide weekly data to different organizations. There is huge amount data suits OLAP that needed to be visualized with charts and pivot tables on web and custom reports will be built by non-it persons (an easy gui). They will enter a date range, location which data columns to be included and generate report and optionally export the data to Excel. They currently prepare reports with MS Excel with Pivot Tables and but they need a better online tool now to show data to their customers. Tables are huge and need of drill-down functionality. My current knowledge Spring, Flex, MySql, Linux. I have some knowledge of PostgreSQL and MSSQL and Windows. What is the easiest way of doing this project. Do you think that SSRP (haven't tried yet) and ASP.NET better suits for this kind of job. Actually I prefer open source solutions. Flex have OLAP Data Grid control which do aggregation on client side. JasperServer seems promising but it seems I need enterprise version (multiple organizations and ad hoc queries). What about Modrian + Flex + PostgreSQL solution? Any previous experience will be appreciated. Yes I am confused with options.
Take a look at DynamicJasper, it's based on JasperReports, but dynamically!
They have a web demo running here, the demo shows how to customize the report results. But as your users wont be IT people, then you will need less options.
DJ Charting API does not appear in the demo, but you can check it here

HTML Reporting Solution

What good components and packages are available for generating HTML reports based on report definitions? I have a truly horrific project where each report is a dedicated aspx page that builds one fantastically big HTML string, which it then assigns to a 'reportBody' Label control.
Standard grids are not a good solution as they provide no grouping capability, but I'm open to buying a grid that is friendly for grouping, printing, and exporting. FYI is one reporting engine option I'll be looking at. What else is there? SSRS may not be an option, as MSSQL may not even be an option.
BTW, this is an ASP.NET web site.
You can try ActiveReports.net
You can use i-net Clear Reports (used to be i-net Crystal-Clear). It has many different output formats like HTML, PDF, Postscript, etc. It can print and of course it supports grouping. It is platform-independent. You can it also use together with your ASP.NET. It support many different database like MS SQL, Oracle, MySQL, etc. But also other data sources are possible. The free and fully functional report designer is very easy to use.
Also, the pricing is far below other reporting tools such as Crystal Reports.
you can still use RDLC reports, and just build them in local mode (no SQL SERVER required). I routinely feed my RDLC reports data from the results of function calls rather than have them intimately tied to the database.
The DevExpress ASPxGridView has proven to be an excellent tool for this job.
Standard grids are not a good solution
as they provide no grouping capability
If you want to create your own, I can give you some advice. First, you could probably create the groups with ROLLUP or COMPUTE statements or similar in your SQL and use a grid.
I went the following route: reports are data-driven, so that I know which columns can be grouped and which ones need totals computed. I use a standard DataGrid, and in the ItemDataBound event, I keep a running total for any columns that require it, and then detect changes in the group column. When detected, I insert a group total, reset the running totals and insert out a new group header.
I did a quick prototype of this in a day. But by the time you work out all the little details to give the reports all the features they need, and make them look just right, you'll spend quite a bit of time and end up with a small mountain of code.

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