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Wednesday, October 10, 2007

Active Reports

ActiveReports for .NET from Data Dynamics is the unsung hero of .NET reporting. In a category traditionally dominated by high-priced reporting, ActiveReports has been a affordable alternative that packs in just as many features.

Using ActiveReports you can create reports from OLEDB and SQLClient data sources within your .NET application, as well as XML, ADO.NET data sets, views, tables and row collections, as well as unbound data (i.e. data that is not bound to a specific data set until the report is run.)

As ActiveReports has been around for a while, the report designer itself has been improved through a number of iterations over the years and Visual Studio developers should feel right at home, as it is integrated within the Visual Studio.NET IDE. With a logical organisation and workflow, little training is required to start using the tool, with most developers preferring to jump into the tool first and read the documentation later.

ActiveReports supports multiple reporting formats and there are a number of sample reports to demonstrate how the tool can be used. These samples provide a good starting point for your own development and ideas and it is easy to combine different types of report sections into one report. In addition, you can host third-party controls for charting, images, etc. to extend your report design, meaning you aren’t limited to just the features that ActiveReports includes. On the export side, ActiveReports supports RTF, PDF, Excel, HTML, TIFF and text file exports with good results.

For integrating reports into your application, ActiveReports has a number of sample applications to point you in the right direction and the documentation includes full code listings that will allow you to cut and paste code directly into your own application. You can be quite creative with where you place the reports within your application and a well-documented API make customising the report at run-time a snap.

ActiveReports for .NET
Vendor: Data Dynamics
Price: US$499 for Standard Edition

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