Member Avatar for savedlema

Hi!
I'm developing an application for hospital patients information. Now, as common for hospitals, I need to add a feature for various reports.Now I would like to know if you think Crystal Reports are a good option still.

I would like to present many reports which a user will choose what he wants and click "generate", the report is to be presented to him and should allow him to print the report.

I ask you to please share your experience,Is Crystal Report the BEST choice here? (I'm used to display many short reports just in DataGridView but I think I should probably change)

I use VS 2013 + Mysql

Thanks to Daniweb community where I have learned a lot.

Edited by savedlema because: I mentioned the platforms I use in devt
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  • Latest Post Latest Post by xrjf
Member Avatar for xrjf

It depends, from my point of view and experience, on your taste and skills. I did an accounting project which employed Crystal Reports. Reading a good book or tutorial for Crystal Reports will save you many hours. The big advantage is that adding fields or totals in a report is easy and WYSIWYG, although I personally had some trouble during ClickOnce deployments. But after several tries all went smooth. Usually, new updates also reported new problems. The same as when upgrading Visual Studio or when having a new PC. Time after, as new reports were needed, I opted for PdfSharp -an Open Source Library-. All the previous problems dissapeared, but instead there was no WYSIWYG, so you I had to parametrize the fields, do subtotals, totals, page breaks and so on by code. This may be a hard task for some not used to this kind of work.

commented: Thanks very much xrj. +2
Member Avatar for savedlema

Thanks very much xrj, from your contribution, I think I will go for Crystal Reports. Yes, I will get some good tutorials and familiarize myself. Thanks.

Member Avatar for OtepTheThird

You can do a lot of things with Cyrstal Reporting but first you must have to familiarized the Crystal Report data connection as for me its a little bit tricky.

Member Avatar for savedlema

Thanks for the insight OtepTheThird.
I once started working with CrystalReports but I somehow lost interest and decided to just do things in DataGridView.
But I think you can get along with Crystal just well, and if stuck somewhere, you can always come to Daniweb for help.
I'll share good tutorials when I do my self-teach.

Member Avatar for xrjf

If ever you change your mind and go for the open source solution find attached a VStudio 2010 project. Need to say I did no charting. The .vb file names ending in "pdf" invoke pdfsharp.dll. The ones ending in "xls" correspond to the "pdf" ones with same sufix and the output format is an Excel Workbook. Note there are two font files (.ttf) to ensure the .pdf file contains embedded the required font. If you do so, you'll need to change the paths, the web reference, fields and anything else required to your needs.

commented: Thanks xrj, but I sorry, I can't see any attachment. Did you forget to attach? +2
Member Avatar for savedlema

Thanks xrj, sorry, I can't see any attachment, did you forget to attach?

Member Avatar for xrjf

Ops! I am sorry and thanks for your advice. Seems the file size exceeded the maximum. I hope this time it works.

Member Avatar for xrjf

Please, go to my website's download page Here. If needed, I'll appreciate any feedback. Hope it helps!

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