MS SQL Server Reporting Services - Re: Choosing between Crystal Enterprise 11 and Reporting Services

Author

Re: Choosing between Crystal Enterprise 11 and Reporting Services

ViperD

2005-08-31, 1:24 pm

Dewayne, the problems you listed those are problems you had with Crystal
Reports? I'm new here and got way confused reading your post, no offence.

"Dewayne Christensen" wrote:

> Oh, where to start...
>
>
> We were and we did: it's RS from here on out.
>
> I've been working with the version of Crystal that's included with VS2K3
> (and older versions prior to that; back to Crystal 3.0). We're not about to
> give Crystal any more money for newer versions.
>
> Someone here priced an enterprise-level Crystal rollout. I don't know for
> sure if they were looking at Crystal Enterprise or some other Crystal
> package, but the price was in the $50K range.
>
>
>
> Seriously lacking. Commonly the designer crashes and brings down the entire
> IDE. You'd think I would have learned to stop cutting and pasting lines by
> now, but anyway...
>
> Too sensitive to underlying database changes. Add or remove a column, and
> more often than not, you're left staring at one of Crystal's two error
> messages. No attempt to print and just skip the data from the column, no
> message saying "this column no longer exists," no attempt to see if the
> column simply swapped positions with its neighbor.
>
>
>
> We had big problems with the web form viewer not closing database
> connections. We've rewritten all the reports now to bind to datasets that we
> load ourselves. Crystal no longer touches the database directly.
>
>
>
> Useful error messages. MIA. No workaround.
>
> Usable Excel export. Now that we're bound to datasets, instead of using
> Crystal's Excel export, we spit the dataset out to an XMLSS-format file that
> Excel can read.
>
> Subreports can only be nested one level deep. I've wanted more, but it's
> never been a big deal to work around.
>
> Before binding to datasets, with the web form viewer, every time you went
> from page-to-page within a report, the underlying query would get rerun. For
> some reports, that meant you waited three minutes every time you moved to
> the next page. You can use what they call "cached" reports, but that led us
> into other issues, like the orphaned connections.
>
> In general, you fight and fight with the bloody thing, and eventually get it
> to the "good enough" point.
>
>
>
> Not with VS2K3. I think Crystal Info (Crystal Enterprise?) (a separate
> product with a separate price tag) is intended for end user adhoc reporting,
> but I've never used it.
>
>
>
> It's kind of a pain, and you wind up fighting with generic "Logon failed"
> errors a lot (even though half the time, the problem isn't actually a logon
> failure...), but once you've got the code written, you don't have to write
> it any more.
>
> Which brings up another major problem: lousy, lousy, lousy error messages.
> _Everything_ is either a "logon failure" or "the system has thrown an
> exception of type exception." Everything. I bet if I went through the .exe
> with a hex editor, those would be the only two error messages in there.
> Messages from the underlying data source are NEVER propogated up to you.
>
>
>
> No.
>
>
>
> Yes.
>
>
>
> Once you endure the pain, the paper can be as good as you want it to be. The
> web view and the PDF can be a little or a lot off, though in general it's
> good enough. I've got a handful where the web view is just completely
> garbage. I would hope the WinForm viewer could do a better job than the
> WebForm viewer, since it's not constrained by HTML, but I don't know.
>
> If your're using the built-in toolbar in the web viewer, you have to put up
> with the stupid Crystal logo in your face or beat it into submission, either
> via CSS or by replacing the .gif.
>
> Rich interactivity? I think you can do some drill-down type stuff, but what
> I've seen I wouldn't call rich. We don't have a need for it, so I haven't
> tried it, but I don't have high hopes.
>
>
>
> You can hit anything with an OLEDB or ODBC driver, which covers most any
> database you'd want to use. You can also bind to datasets, so anything you
> can put into a dataset can be sourced. If you buy the full-blown package you
> gain other sources, like MS Exchange, NT event logs, IIS logs, etc.
>
>
>
> Excel export can be pretty bad. A single report column can bounce between
> multiple Excel columns, headers don't line up with their data, lotsa blank
> columns thrown in sporadically, etc. It tries (poorly) to do an exact
> _visual_ recreation of the report in Excel, which is rarely what you really
> want when you're dumping to Excel. If you want a spreadsheet it's probably
> because you want to work with the data, which means you really don't want
> things like page breaks/headers/footers in the middle of data columns.
>
> PDF is better, but still has problems with WYSIWYG. When you compare screen
> output to printed output to PDF output, lines wrap in different places,
> columns may be wide enough when PDF'd but not when printed, things that are
> exactly aligned in the designer will be off a few pixels when PDF'd, and if
> you use non-default line spacing, the screen output (ASP.NET) goes totally
> to pot.
>
> There is no plain-text export option. You get rich text, Word, Excel, HTML,
> and PDF. (Remember, this is the version included with VS2K3.) No text, no
> CSV. Full-blown version gets you more.
>
>
>
> Lousy, lousy, lousy error messages. Regular crashes. $50K price tags. Stupid
> "keycodev2.dll" problems. Screwball object models. _Multiple_ screwball
> object models. (What Microsoft is to data access models, Crystal is to
> report object models.) Weird home-grown formula language. Deployment
> problems. Version conflicts. (This is NOT a .NET reporting platform. This a
> DLL-hell-based reporting platform with a .NET wrapper.)
>
>
>
> What report management component?
>
> Seriously, though, the version in the VS2K3 box is targeted for embedded use
> by developers, so there's nothing an administrator could use for anything.
> Crystal Enterprise probably does, but I don't know.
>
>
>
> There's a well-established community of people who can't stand the product,
> but that's probably not what you meant...
>
>
>

Dewayne Christensen

2005-08-31, 8:24 pm

> Dewayne, the problems you listed those are problems you had with Crystal
> Reports? I'm new here and got way confused reading your post, no offence.

Correct. They're problems I've run into with the version of Crystal that
ships with VS2003.

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