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SSW Guidelines for Report Solutions - Rich Clients
Rich Clients
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Reporting Services
Pros
- Great designer
- Web based
- Can render to a number of different formats
-
Can export to office web components so that the user can
continue with further analysis
- Access Report import wizard
Cons
-
Need to launch a browser window or embed a browser window
control within the application
- The charting components are still a little basic
Figure: Reporting Services 2005 Report
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ASP.NET Pages
Pros
- Highly customizable
- Web based
- Easily integrates into your website
Cons
- Development Time
- Can be fiddly making reports look nice
Figure: Aspx used for reporting
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Excel
Recommended for numerical tabular data it allows further analysis
by the user eg. Sales Reports
Pros
-
You can link the data in a sheet and then design a spreadsheet
without using ANY code.
-
You get the auto filters for free but the limitation is row and
column based and the layout is restricted.
Cons
-
Development Time (if you opt for manually hand coding OLE
Automation instead of using the above method)
Figure 1 We used this method for reporting in Incident PRO!
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Crystal
Recommend for external documents
Pros
- Excellent for printed documents Eg. Invoices
Con
- Deployment issues
- 7.5 MB extra to .exe
Note: We used this method for reporting in SQL Auditor
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XML/XSL
OK for simple tabular reports
Cons
- No Graphs
- Development Time
- XSL is very hard to debug
Note: We used this method for reporting in Code Auditor
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Access
Pros
Cons
- Not every end user has Access (this is a show stopper!)
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Data Analyzer
Microsoft Data Analyzer - $250 AUS
