Some time ago, I used IReport to create reports.
Now I am an Eclipse developer and need something integrated into Eclipse.
I found JasperAssistant, JasperWave and JasperStudio and would like to hear somebody who has experience with these tools ?
JasperAssistant is a stagnant project, it hasn't been updated in years, so unless you're tied to using an older version of JasperReports I really wouldn't consider it.
JasperWave is good. It's easy to use and more reliable than the older versions of iReport, though it has it's issues. I'm using this personally and would recommend it, but I confess I have iReport as a backup and launch that instead if know I won't be touching code. Also, JasperWave is only made for JR 3.7.6, so if you want to use the latest version of JR you'll want to give it a miss.
JasperStudio is the latest thing from Jaspersoft, and seeing that it is from them I have high expectations. I'd definitely try it out, but as far as I know it's only for JR 4.1.1 (I'm fixed to using 3.7.6). There's probably a much greater chance of this being constantly updated as newer versions of JR are released, so this is what I'd choose if I were starting from scratch now.
Jasper Wave does not have the basic functionality of Tables and Crosstabs so that is also not of much use.
Jasper Studio is the way to go.
Related
Very little has changed in a while for BIRT. Since the project seems still heavily used, it would be interesting to know if there are future plans and if so, what is entailed in those plans. Subsequently, based on the development status: Is BIRT still a safe platform to base development on or is it expected to just be conserved in the current state such that occuring bugs probably won't get fixed?
We decided to use BIRT instead of Jasper 8 years ago.
We are still using 4.2.1 for development and 4.3.0 for production runtime.
I reported several bugs since then and only very few of them got fixed.
Furthermore, I developed some patches to enhance the word emitter output - with no reaction from any one at all.
I also developed a patch to allow kind of a vertical tab (to place something at a fix y position on the page (but not in the page footer). With my previous experience of the community, I did not publish that one.
I can say that while the source code is quite easy to read, it is nevertheless almost impossible to understand what is actually going on, because the functions are extremely deeply nested.
My conclusion with 8 years experience of using BIRT for production:
PROS:
BIRT is very powerful and flexible, you can achieve some very cool results.
The quality of the resulting PDFs.
There are only very few things I miss and cannot work around.
The runtime engine is very stable and fast enough, very few problems.
The community is helpful.
CONS:
From an open-source perspective, it is one of the weakest projects I know of.
New versions tend to introduce more bugs than they fix.
Bugs, ideas and patches from the community seem to be ignored most of the time.
Lack of internal code quality and documentation.
Update Dec 2021:
BIRT is back again!
The open source project is quite busy (see answer by Alexander Fedorov) and every help is welcome.
It looks like there will be a new release soon.
Until then, building BIRT yourself (with Eclipse 2021-09 and Java 11) has become quite easy thanks to the common effort of the community.
Metadata and information about the health of an Eclipse project can be found on projects.eclipse.org:
The Birt project is still alive, but not as active as before:
there has been only one release per year since 2016 and
in the last three months there have been more than 20 commits from 11 contributors.
Like all open source projects, the success of the project depends on participation. Therefore, I encourage everybody to report bugs and propose changes to Birt and other open source projects.
Update: Good news, Eclipse Birt has been rebooted. It is under active development again, there have been more than 100 commits in two and a half months and the release 4.9.0 is scheduled for March 16, 2022.
The Eclipse BIRT project has been restarted recently, and we are working to prepare Eclipse BIRT 4.9 release.
Contributors are very welcome. Here is the brief instruction regarding steps how to join this effort: https://eclipse.github.io/birt-website/docs/community
Latest versions of BIRT are not available in maven.
I would like to use JasperReports as a reporting library, but I can't use iReport (as I have learned from some sites), because the connection to the database and my requests are done from Java (I have done some complex calculations).
I have seen a lot of example that use iReport but I haven't seen one without it.
Also my reports should contain a lot of charts, it is painful to write all of that manually because I will generate a lot of reports and charts!!
My questions:
Is there an example how to do that? (I am using Java and JSF.)
Is a possible to use iReport? :)
Mmmh, I just noticed this question was asked more then 6 years ago... Will leave my answer here as reference.
If I understand correctly you want to create Jaspersoft reports without using Ireport or Jaspersoft Studio. As the report templates are in essence XML this is possible. For more information on the structure... see amongst other : https://www.tutorialspoint.com/jasper_reports/index.htm
To compile the report from it's source to the compiled report you can use IReport or Jaspersoft Studio. This can however also be done from Java code as shown here: https://www.developer.com/java/getting-started-with-jasperreport.html This reference is based on a quick search on the internet.
Hope this helps.
Kind regards.
I've never had to deal with different Crystal versions before, so I'm hoping someone here would know.
Yesterday, I was contacted by another department. They had a legacy application using a CR v8.5 template which needed to be edited. I opened the .rpt file in my Crystal XI Designer, made the changes in about 5 seconds (suppressing a few fields and subsections), and emailed it right back. Of course, the legacy app immediately choked on this new template.
Hence my question, how do I use my CR XI Designer to save this template in the 8.5 format?
I found a possible solution on the internet using some shareware program called Crystal Translator. But I hesitate to download yet another freeware app to my work computer without some assurance it'll fix the problem. (Edit: No such luck)
(Edit #2: Stay far far away from this app. I uninstalled it and it seems to have taken half of Crystal Reports with it. This is exactly why I don't try out freeware.)
Edit
According to Downgrade a crystal report to an older version?, this simply can't be done.
Crystal Reports does NOT support saving reports in earlier versions. Your only option is to find a copy of 8.5.
I recall (but am not sure) that some years ago, I used CR 10's Save-As function to save in CR 8.5 format.
This post is congruent with my memory.
http://it.toolbox.com/wiki/index.php/Can_I_save_from_Crystal_XI_to_Crystal_8.5_format%3F.
The Eclipse Visual Editor project seems to be dead, no commits, no updates. Any one know what is happening?
Update 2: The project has been archived (i.e. dead) since June 2011 again.
Update: The project has been revived and is now under active development again.
Its pretty much dead due to a lack of developer support. Here are some recent posts from their mailing list talking about a lack of movement on the project.
What's happening? It's called NetBeans, and it's already happened.
I'm going to get voted down for this but they know it's true. I love eclipse and have used it religiously since I started Java. I'm not saying I like Netbeans, it's just all I hear whenever the concept of a Java visual editor is brought up.
The Jigloo plug-in for Eclipse is a pretty great alternative to the Visual Editor. Though still not quite as nice as the Netbeans GUI editor it is fairly robust and fully featured, especially compared to what was available in the Visual Editor plug-in. Definitely should give it a shot.
Actually NetBeans has gotten MUCH MUCH better. I've used Eclipse, Netbeans and IntelliJ for a few years each, and NetBeans is at least as good (performance, usability & features) as the others now.
It's also improving more quickly than the others are.
They have people working full time on alternate language support, so you'll find they have the best Ruby support in the industry, and I believe Python is about to become that good as well.
Of course, Eclipse still has that crazy-cool todo list that remembers which files you worked on for each bug and can take you back to the set of files/edits for any bug you've worked on, that's really amazing to use and I don't think it's available on either of the other platforms.
--- Revision from years in the future ---
I have used Netbeans more and really have to give the award to Eclipse. The difference has been in vertical programming environments--most will target Eclipse and ignore netbeans. You rarely need these, but when you need them there is often no way around them. If Netbeans does have an equivalent, it's often buggy to the point of not being usable, generally the biggest issue is emulator support.
You won't run into these unless you are working in a specific industry--Android development is one, the primary drive was to support Eclipse, NB seems to trail. Another I've worked on is in the TV/Cable industry.
For raw java development, however, I'd still give Netbeans a little edge because it's the environment that was targeted and supported by sun.
Visual Editor is doing a new release, 1.4, on September 16. Installation instructions for the RC are here:
http://wiki.eclipse.org/VE/Update
FWIW, the project did stall for a while. But there is a new, and relatively diverse group of folks working on it again. Most of the recent work is concerned with making the new release compatible with Eclipse Galileo.
It's officially dead as of May 2011. It's archived here, but slow to download and tricky to install. Instead, there's a new editor, WindowBuilder Pro.
Currentlty Google have Open Sourced the Windows Builder Pro. It seems nice
yeap,
http://www.eclipsezone.com/eclipse/forums/t91368.html
Yes, sadly, it is dead. Looking at the aforementioned email threads regarding it's revival I get the feeling that even if it does get picked up it will quickly collapse under the weight of some new requirements ("make it universal, edit everything from SWT to HTML").
WindowBuilder can be a good alternative. I had several problems with VE and I end up with WindowBuilder who worked for me perfectly.
http://www.eclipse.org/windowbuilder/
We have been using .Net and Visual Studio for the last six years, and early on developed a number of web based reporting applications using the .Net version of Crystal Reports that was bundled with Visual Studio. I'm unimpressed with that product: It seems incredibly difficult and convoluted to use. We had to make security changes, install various extra software, and so on.
Now, we are moving to VS2008 and version 3.5 of the .Net framework, and the time has come to redevelop old applications. Our Crystal .Net developers are long gone and I face a decision: Do we stick with Crystal or move to something else? We have the "full" version of Crystal Reports XI at our disposal.
We produce PDF versions of data extracted from various databases. Some apps use the built-in Report Viewer but this seems redundant with the flexibility of grid views. We still need to produce printable PDFs in the grid or in a downloadable Excel format.
Is Crystal Reports .Net worth persisting with, or should we work out how to use version XI?
Alternatively is there a simple and low cost way to generate PDF reports without using Crystal?
I have experience with reporting in CrystalReports (trying lite version bundled with Visual Studio), ActiveReports from DataDynamics (4 years, full version), Reporting from Telerik (trying trial version) and XtraReports from DevExpress (last one year).
I think ( and not only me :) ), the CrystalReports are most uneficient tool ( developer productivity ) from this tools. The DataDynamics are much, much more better, bud is littlebit buggy :(. Last year we decided to change reporting suite - we have choosen a XtraReports ( with source code ), and I'm totaly happy. The price is little, no bugs ( to now :) ), wonderfull support, and ( the most important ) the productivity was grown a lot.
I recomend you DevExpress's or Telerik's reporting tools.
I would recommended i-net Clear Reports (used to be i-net Crystal-Clear). It can read your existing *.rpt files. Has a better and easier-to-use API (which I admit is not saying much...).
Like you, I've had poor experiences with Crystal Reports, and my gut instinct is to post "avoid it at all costs" in all caps with lots of exclamation points. However, I've had my afternoon nap today, so I'll post like a grownup.
If all you're looking to do is pdf-ize (yes, it's a real word, damnit!) then you might look into some of the PDF widgets like ABCPDF and the like. It's relatively easy to pop a well-formatted web page into a PDF document and be done with it.
However, if you need tight report formatting, consider sticking with crystal reports -- you have a big investment and knowledge base in the technology. Or, alternately, you could switch to ActiveReports or SQL Server reporting services.
I guess the cost/benefit analysis is the cost of retraining your dev team, and investing in the new technologies.
Move away from CR: just get a good PDF generator and Excel engine for .NET, and feed those using your own database code. You can use all the powerful .NET features, including LINQ, without having to wrestle with the Crystal Reports runtime and its woefully inadequate documentation and support.
I can suggest that the built in Microsoft reporting framework works adequately. You can do local reports or MS SQL server based reports. There is a client control that displays reports and can export to formats such as pdf and Excel. Visual Studio can handle report design for the stack.
As far as if it is better than Crystal Reports, I'd say check it out and see if you like it any better or worse. I've worked with the Microsoft Report Viewer more than Crystal Reports but both seem to be fairly similar. Offhand, Crystal Reports seems to be a more advanced reporting tool but more complicated.
I'm not sure about how to utilize the Microsoft Report Viewer infrastructure outside of Visual Studio. If you are using Visual Studio it should all be available in there and you can follow the online help instructions for deploying the pieces for your servers to your servers.
I have used ActiveReports from DataDynamics and Crystal Reports. Of these two, I would recommend ActiveReports above Crystal based on ease of use and, more importantly, future maintenance.
We use Crystal in our shop too. We are currently on 8.5, which is way old and is no longer supported by SAP. We tried to upgrade to CRXI recently, which involved an entirely new API. We had to shelf the effort due to other priorities. While working on the upgrade I found support for CRXI on a number of forums. Google it.
I believe you can find a cheap way to generate PDFs without using Crystal. I believe Adobe gives the creation part away for free. I would visit their site and look into it.
I would recommend staying with Crystal only if you had a lot of reports that were already using that technology.
Get out of Crystal Reports. They are poor.
Check out SQL Reporting Services. It works very well with .NET. Try it out. There is a learning curve, but when is there not?
IMO, you should consider other criteria as well such as:
Cost of the software
Integration with your .NET applications
API and Programmatic flexibility (All said and done, there are always the "customizations" and tailoring. For such scenarios , developers eventually fall back on programmatic solutions vs. out of box
Now, in my experience (having used both Crystal Reports and SSRS(2005/2008) , though Crystal Reports does come with a friendly set of API, it fails in many basic criteria and developers end fighting the software. This is I say based on my experience with SSRS where developers are far more comfortable with. For starters, it uses XML extensively and the provision to use custom code assemblies does not harm either.
--I think you would where I am getting at---
"Consider & Evaluate SSRS*. If you are hesitant at first, then do a Proof of Concept and test your requirements. I have a feeling you will be pleased with what you see
especially considering your requirement of using PDF format.
Developers, especially , MSFT specialists will thank you
Leverage the Programmatic rendering of the reports (though it sounds fancy , trust me , its not more than handling an API call
For e.g.:
public Byte[] Render
(
string Report,
string Format,
string HistoryID,
string DeviceInfo,
[Namespace].ParameterValue[] Parameters,
[Namespace].DataSourceCredentials[] Credentials,
string ShowHideToggle,
out string Encoding,
out string MimeType,
out [Namespace].ParameterValue[] ParametersUsed,
out [Namespace].Warning[] Warnings
out string[] StreamIds);
Member of [Namespace].ReportingService
)
--- where Format will be "PDF"
Hope you find this relevant