Debugging the easy way

[pricerc]

Crystal Reports

Crystal Reports is like that machine that many factories have... The one that's been there for 30 years and runs off a DOS program that nobody has the source code for any more.

And it uses a file format that only it understands. And that is the only format generated by the program that runs the factory.

And getting a new one is just not "cost-effective", because, well, it's working, right? even if it requires constant maintenance so that it can carry on doing the only thing it's been doing for 30 years, and new ones can do so much more...

I think you'd do yourself a huge service if you can "eject" Crystal from your main code base. You'll remove a major pain point (I've coded with Crystal, so you have my sympathies), and provide a platform for interesting new features, not least of which would be the possibility of using an engine other than Crystal.

I have written a couple of small standalone apps that use the Crystal Runtime to generate PDF files - so I know that it would be fairly easy to have an external app (e.g.) monitoring a folder or SQL table where 'metadata' is deposited by Jiwa, for processing by the external reporting engine, whatever form that takes.

Long reports would also no longer have the user twiddling their thumbs for 30 minutes while the report runs...

And there are a few other engines out there that are much less "Bloaty" than CR, which hasn't changed functionally (as far as I can tell) in 20 years, and yet is now 10 times the size it once was.

[Mike.Sheen]

I think you'd do yourself a huge service if you can "eject" Crystal from your main code base. You'll remove a major pain point (I've coded with Crystal, so you have my sympathies), and provide a platform for interesting new features, not least of which would be the possibility of using an engine other than Crystal.

Indeed. DEV-9429 mentions not only investigating .NET 6 and isolating Crystal to a separate process, but adding a modern reporting framework also.

I've previously experimented with Data Dynamics Reports which included a built-in report designer / editor - that was a while ago, so I'm sure there is a lot more choice today then there was then.

When I showed this new reporting engine + designer at the 2010 Jiwa Solutions Provider conference, there was insistence that we can't just abandon Crystal Reports and have everyone lose their investment in existing reports they'd written - So we should look at making a reporting provider interface and allow plugins to register themselves as a reporting provider and let reports be attached to a reporting provider, and that way we can support whatever reporting framework du jour.

[SBarnes]

I'd take a look at Bold Reports by Syncfusion, it not only supports a report designer under win forms but also under asp.net core and supports RDL, my memory of Active Reports is it's only Win forms based but that was quite a while ago.

They also have community licenses.

[Mike.Sheen]

I'd take a look at Bold Reports by Syncfusion, it not only supports a report designer under win forms but also under asp.net core and supports RDL, my memory of Active Reports is it's only Win forms based but that was quite a while ago.

They also have community licenses.

It wasn't Active Reports, but Data Dynamics Reports that I'd played with - which is now Flex Report which does support .NET 6+.

It's easy to get confused, because they got assimilated by Grape City and they have their own Active Reports product which has a lot of overlap with Flex Report.

We could also consider just doing some Razor pages and reports would be some simple html, css and a bit of c# to render a report.

[SBarnes]

DevExpress also have a solution that supports an inbuilt designer as well.

Whilst Razor pages would not be that hard to achieve, probably things could be made a bit more interactive and easier to maintain with something like Blazor server.

Regardless Crystal is not going anywhere soon so some sort of reporting server that supported Crystal even as pdfs would probably be necessary,

.net Core /.net 6 reporting has come a long way in recent times as before there was nothing and what did exist was expensive.

[pricerc]

DevExpress also have a solution that supports an inbuilt designer as well.

A built-in designer would go a long way to offsetting the hassle of switching from Crystal.

The Crystal designer has an awful UX, especially considering the price.

Most of our customers use fewer than 10 "document formats" (invoice, statement, purchase order, etc) that will be trivial to recreate in any half-decent integrated designer.

The more complicated reports, like financial and tax reports might be a little trickier, but there are usually even fewer of those, and they usually don't even need to be as "pretty" - many of our customers just use Excel to pull the data directly from the database instead of generating a report in (e.g.) Crystal, which is too much hassle. If they could have access to an easy-to report writer, we may be able to get them to use it...

Regardless Crystal is not going anywhere soon so some sort of reporting server that supported Crystal even as pdfs would probably be necessary,

Crystal does have huge inertia.

Crystal Reports do, of course, have an existing 'server' product. But from my experience so far, it sucks (we have it installed at a couple of customers). Certainly as far as the needs of our small business clients are concerned. It might work ok for large companies with their own IT teams, but for our SMEs, it's way too complicated. And the management UI is worse than the Crystal designer.

And I expect it would be easier to adapt the existing Jiwa code using the Crystal API than it would be to integrate with the Crystal server product.

[SBarnes]

I wasn't referring to crystal server I was referring to the idea of some sort of interface that could serve the reports that are in Jiwa.

Anyway porting to .net6 is the bigger target.

[pricerc]

I wasn't referring to crystal server

I didn't think you were.

I was just highlighting that it would be a waste of time to consider it. Which some might be tempted to because, it's a "report server".

It would 'technically' meet the requirement of being a Windows/Web service that serves up documents and reports, but it would still suck, because it's still Crystal.