Crystal Reports

Someone can say that Crystal reports are outdated, It has already died ! Is that so ?

Let’s discuss.

Crystal is pretty much the boss of banded report writers. Though today most of the developers are migrating to SSRS (SQL Server Reporting Services) for cost reduction, simplification and leaving behind several key capabilities, still Crystal is embedded deeply in enough organisations that skills there will be of value for a long time to come.

Crystal Reports is a popular Windows-based report writer solution that allows a developer to create reports and dashboards from a variety of data sources with a minimum of code to write. When using it for Visual Studio .NET, crystal reports are the standard reporting tool to display data of presentation quality. Creating a Crystal Report requires minimal coding since it is created in the Designer interface. It is available as an integrated feature of Microsoft Visual Studio .NET, Borland Delphi, and C#Builder.

Advantages of Crystal Reports

Some of the major advantages of using Crystal Reports are:

• Rapid report development since the designer interface would ease the coding work for the programmer.
• Can extend it to complicated reports with interactive charts and enhance the understanding of the business model
• Expose a report object model, that can interact with other controls on the ASP.NET Web form.
• Can programmatically export the reports into widely used formats like .pdf, .doc, .xls, .html and .rtf

Crystal reports over SQL Server Reporting Service (SSRS)

When this is compared with SSRS, both of these solutions are similar in that they can collect data from a variety of sources and build a report that reflects that data to end-users in a relevant way.

• Crystal reports offer a user-friendly drag-and-drop solution as well as more report formatting options. This enables end-users to create basic and intermediate reports quickly. But SSRS is more complicated to learn and requires some database expertise, so it is more powerful and is designed around direct SQL access. It includes a more robust development environment, as well as a user interface tailored to programmers.
• While Crystal includes a report explorer that provides a beautiful, concise perspective of items and where they occur inside the report, SSRS simply lists them alphabetically in properties.
• Unlike Crystal, SSRS does not enable you to change any programming while in preview mode, which means you can’t format on the fly and must exit the preview to make changes.
• When it comes to printing reports, Crystal excels. In SSRS, the report size and margin options can result in blank pages.

❗️Conclusion

If you a .Net developer , working in Visual Studio, and wanna add professional quality reports to your application, Yes there you can go with Crystal reports ! It’s quite easy and simple.

Thank you!