Crystal Reports from Business Objects is one of the most familiar tools for developers, through it’s long association with Microsoft and Visual Studio. There are actually two editions of Crystal Reports that developers can use-- Crystal Reports for Visual Studio.NET is the bundled report writer that is included with Visual Studio.NET versions, which Crystal Reports 10 is the stand-alone, retail edition that developers can upgrade to or buy outright. For this review, we will be looking at the latter as most developers upgrade to get the latest features and functionality.
Crystal Reports can report off of a number of different data sources through ODBC, OLAP and direct database drivers and can connect to custom data sources as well. When creating a report from a data source, you can simply drag-and-drop fields onto your report and Crystal Reports will build the SQL automatically for you or you can write your own SQL statement.
The report designer itself is intuitive and there are a number of “experts” or “wizards” to guide you through common reporting tasks, like creating a basic report, creating a running total, and so forth. The number of report formats that Crystal Reports supports is limited only by your imagination and how much time you have on your hands.
A single Crystal Report can include multiple sections (including types of sections, i.e. 2 page headers) and multiple objects in those sections, including charts, graphs, cross-tab tables, geographic maps, formulas, etc.
For exporting a report, Crystal Reports supports over 16 different formats, including HTML, DHTML, PDF, Excel, Word, RTF and Text formats, with special export options for making reports exported to Excel more functional.
On the integration side, Crystal Reports has the widest platform support of any of the tools we looked at in this review, including integrated IDE support for tools from Borland and IBM, as well as platform support for COM,
The one area that developers will struggle with when integrating Crystal Reports is scalability. Business Objects makes it’s money through selling products and licenses, including an enterprise reporting solution called “Crystal Enterprise”.
Developers who want to build large-scale applications will find themselves either purchasing additional licenses or changing their application to work with Crystal Enterprise to get the kind of performance they need. The pricing for these solutions can be prohibitive for developers, especially when other reporting products provide a scalable framework for reporting for the original product price.
Vendor: Business Objects
Price: $685 for Developer Edition
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