I have a small web application based on asp.net 2010 that manages invoices.
After the invoice is saved, it should automatically generate a pdf file.
which of the following solutions would be fast and easy to incorporate?
Use Sql Server 2008 Reports
Use Crystal Reports 2008 and Crystal Reports 2008 for VS 2010
Use itextsharp to create the pdf file
Use XSLFO to create the pdf file
The point here is I dont know any of the above. Which one is easy and quick to learn and implement. Are there any other solution to achieve this functionality?
The first two options sound a bit heavyweight for your requirements.
You don't say if you require it to be free (open source) or if you are happy to pay for a solution; a quick search found this: ExpertPDF HtmlToPdf Converter
I have to admit that I have never used it but it might be an easy solution if you are already displaying the invoice on your web page.
I would go for XSL-FO as it is open standard and you are not being locked in a proprietary solution. You also have access to visual XSL-FO editors/designers and 3 or 4 high volume server to choose from.
As far as I know, many invoicing statements solutions today use XSL-FO becuse it is very powerful - you can footnotes or very complex pagination, 10-20 output formats, etc.
I personally prefer iTextSharp as it is very flexible as you build the PDF from code as you need it. However as it is a port of the iText open source java library for PDF it is not 100% intuitive (well from a c# perspective)..
However said there are a lot of help blogs and articles.
I have found:-
SQL server 2008 needs a lot of configuration and does not quite give you what you want.
You need to purchase Crystal Reports, however said it is quite a good product
iTextSharp - Free, fairly easy to set up but not 100% intuitive
I have used this and found it tough going although it is possible to get the desired ouput.
edit
For question regarding VS2010, I used it with VS2005 a number of years ago as the basic version came shipped with VS2005. According to the website it appears to integrate into Visual Studio 2010, however this I suspect depends on what version you have.
SAP Crystal Reports can open and edit
files created with SAP Crystal
Reports, version for Visual Studio
2010 (and vice-versa), providing a
fuller set of report design features
compared to SAP Crystal Reports,
version for Visual Studio 2010. SAP
Crystal Reports does not include
tooling to support the Visual Studio
2010 development environment but
developers can use the SAP Crystal
Reports, version for Visual Studio
2010 runtime engine to deploy SAP
Crystal Reports RPT files with all the
extended design features.
i have done something similar with XSLFO - if you know XSLT then XSLFO is very simple to add to XSLT
For me, using Aspose.Words with the mailmerge feature was always the fastest and most flexible/comfortable solution, although not the cheapest.
The super simple way is use third party converter such as ABCPdf, Winnovative PDF Converter. But they cost abount $500 USD.
You said you bought Crystal Report, it can use to generate pdf as well, just use Crystal Report design the pdf template, connect to your database (dataset,datatables). In your code to push data from your database and fill the pdf template finally save as pdf.
But deploy Crystal Report you need merge some modules, otherwise you need install Crystal Report on your server as well.
Related
There is an excellent article available at the following URL (below), but I cannot figure out where I can download a copy of Microsoft Visual Studio 2008. I've looked all over the Internet, but the download links are either not working (those that are at Microsoft), or they go to very suspicious looking websites.
https://www.codeproject.com/Articles/28792/Debugging-Classic-ASP-VBScript-in-Visual-Studio-20
Of course the other question that can be asked is, can this process be adapted to work on the most recent version (or at least a version that can actually be downloaded)?
Here's one link for you, straight from the horse's hands.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=13276
Is there such a thing ? I'd really like to be able to browse my sqlite 3 databases. Can't seem to find any useful tools.
You mean a tool like SQLiteAdmin?
I haven't tried it in a while, but there's sqlitecc. Also, there's dbedit2.
You can actually browse SQLite databases with Visual Studio's built-in server explorer. All you need is the free SQLite.NET driver.
Visual Studio 2005/2008 Design-Time Support
You can add a SQLite
connection to the Server Explorer,
create queries with the query
designer, drag-and-drop tables onto a
Typed DataSet and more! SQLite's
designer works on full editions of
Visual Studio 2005/2008, including
VS2005 Express Editions.
* NEW You can create/edit views, tables, indexes, foreign keys,
constraints and triggers interactively
within the Visual Studio Server
Explorer!
(Works with VS2010 as well.)
Seems like there would be a good one, right? A few months back, I had to use one a lot. Everything I tried (all the free ones I could find) were awful, the least awful being sqliteman (http://sqliteman.com/). It's still pretty bad, though.
I'm using SQLite Maestro. While not free, it's a excellent tool. Also look for SQLite Administrator.
There are several versions of the Report Viewer Redistributable. If I'm reading things right, the versions do NOT correspond to a version of Reporting Services. Is this correct? They instead correspond to a version of the .net framework?
Is anyone holding a link to a comparison of versions (8, 9, and 10)? I've tried searching for the information, but just can't find the answer to this one.
Thanks in advance.
Indeed, they do not correspond.
The schemas, you find here
Report Viewer 2010 is version 3 and
uses the RDL specification 2008. Its the version used in VS2010
Report Viewer 2008 is version 2 and
uses the RDL specification 2005. Its the version used in VS2008
This post from Brian Hartman leads you in the right direction concerning the new features but also if you want to know more about report viewer.
This post may interest you if you want to work with the 2010-version:
Hai Friends
I having the project in Vb i want to migrate that project in the vb.net.any tool available pls inform me.i have tried a lot.i have not installed the visual basic.with the help of remote server i am running that project.
Quite a few versions of Visual studio have a built-in Upgrade Wizard to help you with converting VB6 to Vb.Net code. I know that VS 2005 Pro has it but I'm not sure what other versions.
Here's an article about how to go about upgrading. And there's even a complete free e-book about it as can be found here.
Aside from the sources Ho1 mentions some of the biggest pitfalls are the lack of control arrays, printing and graphics. The printing can be partly mitigated by the use of Printer Compatibility. You can download the PCL as part of the Visual Basic Power Pack 3.0.
If you have room in your budget I would recommend ArtinSoft. www.artinsoft.com. They have a trial version that you can test out. They have been named Microsoft's preferred VB to .NET upgrade solution provider.
I have trialed artinsoft's upgrade companion.
I have also looked at vbmigration partner.
This is my, very limited, anecdotal experience.
On vbmigration partner they have some sample conversions of projects they found on planat sourcecode.
One is call ezdatabase.
If you run vbmigration partner's conversion it will crash if you click the connect/disconnect button more than twice.
On the vb6 version you can click this all day without crashing.
This project is small enough to put through the artinsoft trial of vbuc in its entirety, so i did that.
However after i converted it, there seemed to be a lot of compile errors.
It's not a fair comparison as obviously vb migration partner had lots of opportunity to perfect it before putting the converted code on their website. and yet it was easy to crash.
However I was also disappointed with artinsoft's tool as this was just a small (few hundred lines) crud application and yet there were a lot of compile errors.
Make of this what you will. I would like to hear of others' experiences.
EDIT : On the other hand if this is a true test of the relative capabilities of vb migration partner and artinsoft vbuc then vb migration arner is clearly the winner in this example
we are making an application to run on both Mono and .Net. The application is web based, so it uses ASP.Net.
We are now trying to find some kind of reporting software. We would prefer if there was a designer that end users(non-programmers) would be able to use like Crystal Reports.
Currently, we are not finding anything that looks even barely capable. We will have shell access on the server that Mono is running from, so it doesn't matter if there is no true web-preview or something as long as it's capable of creating a PDF on the server in an automated way.
Has anyone seen any competent report writing software that runs on Mono? (Also, licensing doesn't matter as long as it's not GPL)
edit:
Really, even running something that isn't Mono such as PHP or something else light on dependencies would be ok as long as it would run on *nix systems. I just am having trouble finding anything for non-windows systems for the server and Windows systems for the designer(this is the justification for the linux tag)
We've finally found a reporting solution. It's not quite as pretty as Crystal or something like that, but it works, and that's what counts.
It is called FlexCel.Net http://www.tmssoftware.com/site/flexcelnet.asp
You basically design reports in Excel using special markup(actually, you can even design reports in OpenOffice cause thats what I had to do cause there is something wrong with Excel licensing for me)
It's pretty powerful and cheap, about $200 USD. I have already gotten a demo to run on Mono after about 5 hours of tinking and trying to understand how the demos worked. It's pretty neat though and well put together from what I've seen.. I'll come back and edit this answer if we later decide that this software is not good and we don't recommend it.
They commercially support running their software on Mono(except for the Winforms portions) and you also get full source code, so it really is a good deal. The range name = reporting band is a bit strange in the template, but it's still seeming better the more we use it.
Have a look at itextsharp
Your users can create PDF documents with fields, and then you can use the itextsharp library to populate it.
One thing I have been looking at recently is Jasper reports. Its just like Crystal Reports, and with JasperServer users can connect to it using the iReport editor. The hurdle I have is getting it to play nice with Mono See Running report on JasperServer from C#