I'm currently investing Pentaho, Jaspersoft and Birt as possible reporting engines to integrate with the custom software my company develops.
I don't need ETL or OLAP style features. Rather, I want a more productive wysiwyg report designer with a simple deployment option for embedding/deploying over the web.
Are there any recommendations out there that I'm missing?
Thanks a lot.
Not open source, but DBxtra, have an easy to use wysiwyg editor for both the report and the query, and let you embed the reports you create with the Web Report Widget function, the only downside: it run only on Windows, so depending of the platforms you want to deploy your custom software, it may not be useful for you.
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I am trying to use Google.Apis.Analytics.v3 for the 1st time, programmatically. We are building dashboard pages to show statistics, within their organisation-until now I have been reporting on information from internal databases.
Now we want to retrieve data from our Google analytics account.
My main tool for development is visual studio and C#. Some of the webpages have been created just using text editors, by a colleague, but I'm happier doing it in visual studio. We are sharing this development with organisations who do not use visual studio. So when I finish work on my webpages, we make 2 small changes to my files and we can be used without needing visual studio.
I have experience also in JavaScript and some jscript. I did find the Google API nuget package for studio and have installed it (not had time to look at it yet).
Some options Google have on their help site involves languages such as Java that we don't have any experience of in the format they appeared to be using it.
Given the above, can someone advise or recommend the best approach I should take for retrieving Google analytics data into our webpages (I do not want users to have to login-it should just seamlessly retrieve the data and display it).
Thanks
You could make an MVC project, where you can take the data and display it in a View. Here you can see some example with GoogleApi and MVC project in C#.
MorphX report designer in Ax 2009 seems to be not the 'best' as report designer.. I don't know if is my fault, or if morphx report designer too buggy to do his job.
I'm guessing if there are some alternative to do report for Ax 2009: maybe Crystal Report and Visual Studio ? Or ... ?
Thanks
SSRS is the main alternative for AX 2009. You can deploy the reporting extensions and analysis cubes for some good reporting data. Analysis cubes will need to be configured to match your individual license file.
If you just want to be able to create SSRS reports, I believe you can just go to (Admin>Setup>Business analysis>Reporting Services>Reporting Servers" and point to your SSRS instance, and create the "Dynamics AX" data source.
You might need to do Kerberos setup too depending on your environment topology.
The best alternative options is by far Reporting Services. It is supported by Dynamics AX 2009 in a way there there is tools and platforms to develop reports than honor the security from within AX and also the important feature of being able to persist the report design back to the Application Object Tree (under Report Libraries).
How to setup and configure SSRS for Dynamics AX 2009 is a topic on it's own, but there should be plenty of good resources out there to help you.
Good luck!
In addition to previous answers you can use any report designer you like if you are going working with database directly.
But be ready some of axapta features will not be working automatically, for example - labels for enum values.
Great place to start with SSRS using Visual Studio 2008 are screencasts available on youtube, just go onto youtube and search for "AX2009 SSRS".
SSRS is fine for periodic reporting, however "online" reporting - such as invoices, pick lists, etc (anything printed when posting) is better off handled by external software. You may wish to print to file or to a DB and use 3rd party software to pick up the design/formatting.
Bottomline's Create Forms is one example I have seen used. You also have workflow options which is great when you have different companies/customers/suppliers with difference requirements, even better if you have multiple brands within the same company.
Does there exist a fast and light reporting system for projects in Visual Studio for projects in asp .net mvc? Crystal reports is too big and "heavy" and not a good choice for 200+ users who create a PDF report at once.
Thanks for your tips.
I like FastReport. But I just know the Delphi-Version and can't say how mature the .Net-Version is.
The Delphi-version is lightweight, easy to use but with it's scripting-possibilities very powerful.
So I think even the .Net-version should be worth a look.
Take a look into List Label (from combit), too! It has a different approach, a very good designer and direct vendor support. Distribution files are "lightweight" compared to other solutions.
Reporting services is free if you have an sql server license and if you run the reporting services server on the same db server. I consider it pretty lightweight and easy to use.
Try the ItextSharp or the nuget package
We used it's and it was fine!
DevXpress XtraReports allows you to design reports with a good designer then you use them as normal C# classes. I like it very much, you can create reports and export them to pdf file or stream on the server even with no UI at all then you can download the pdf from mvc or store it somewhere. I use it as much as I can.
There is a blog which details about using Active Reports to create reports in a MVC application. You can go through the blog here.
Active Reports is a very flexible and easy to use reporting tool,it is supported on Win Forms, Asp.net, SilverLight and supports data sources like Sql Server, My Sql, XML, Oledb etc.
I need to generate reports from database (billing forms for example) from ASP.NET interface. So I'm wondering which approach is better : Use Crystal Reports, reports based on RDLC or SQL Reporting Services ? I need to create an interface, which allows user to select data and through pre-created report definition generate that report. I want to use ASP.NET with AJAX, so it will act as a real application, but with no need for installation - and this is primary requirement.
So, if somebody knows which technology suits best those requirements...I will be grateful :)
Personally I would go for DevExpress XtraReports.
I have used it in the past in both windows forms and web forms; it costs few hundreds of bucks but with the package you also get plenty of other UI controls, or you spend less and only buy XtraReports. It pays off in a flash, main advantages in my opinion are:
each report can be designed with a Visual Studio integrated designer and becomes a simple c# class, easy to instantiate and use, no magic and no external report definitions, all pure 100% .NET code;
end user designed is royalty free and users are amazed by the power and quality of the designer, with Ribbon or classic UI, plenty of features;
so many out of the box zero coding ready to use features like print preview, export to excel, pdf etc...
Disclaimer: I do not work for DevExpress, I am not paid by them, simply I am a satisfied customer and used their products before with joy and good results, we are now in the process of starting a major MVC application development in my company and we are buying licenses of their DXperience Enterprise subscription these days.
you are free to also evaluate or test Crystal Reports or similar reporting solutions offered by ActiveReports, Telerik etc, I can only speak about XtraReports because I used it a lot, Crystal I used in the past with Visual Studio 2003 but I was not so impressed by the designer and deployment was really a mess in windows forms... always missing some files and having errors on client machines...
I would suggest taking a look at ActiveReports 6. It provides great features and allows you to make almost unlimited customization to your report. For ASP.NET you can either opt for the standard edition which allows you to custom export your reports to different formats like PDF, Excel etc and display them to the users.
The professional edition provides you a webviewer control which allows you to display reports directly on the viewer and the user has the option to chose from PDF, HTML and FlashViewer format. In addition to this it also provides a silverlight based viewer control.
You may also want to check the blogs and the forums just in case you want to get more information about the product.
Thanks,
Sankalp (GrapeCity)
Don't miss to take a look into List & Label, too.
We've done some good projects with it!
We use SQL Server Reporting services, it has a visual studio based designer, and it's free. The distribution is a little tricky - If your clients already have SQL Server installed, then there is a a good chance they will have the reporting framework installed. Otherwise you can get just about distribute the dll's with your application - although this takes a bit of digging.
I've been doing research on reporting suites for a project my company is about to undertake, and have narrowed the candidates down to Active Reports and Crystal Reports.
During the demo yesterday, it was clarified to me that one of the capabilities our client would like is the ability for the end-user to create custom reports integrated into the Web-Based client. I know that both packages have options for integrating an end-user designer to a WinForms based app, but I can't find a definitive straight yes or no answer for either suite as to whether or not it's possible to attach them to an ASP.Net based app.
My instinct is no, but I was hoping somebody with more experience in reporting suites could give me a solid yes or no.
I can't speak for Active Report, but it's not hard to find someone who loathes Crystal Reports. AFAIK crystal report editing on web requires BOXI which cost allot but includes a much better reporting tool called web intelligence or "webbi", think of it as a web based pivot table.
No mater which produced you end up choosing if you don't have a star schema the end users are going to have a hard and frustrating time creating reports. Even if you have an abstraction layer you are going hit walls.
Curious why did you decide against SSRS? If you already own SQL server you already have a license.
I used to love activereports. Haven't used them in a while. Did you know that visual studio has built in reporting? So does SQL Server.
I agree with jms, it's not hard to find someone who hates crystal reports.