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TimSinnott
Starting Member
48 Posts |
 Posted - 2002-09-25 : 20:55:37
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| Hi all,I'm using ASP.NET. Crystal works fine on my development machine, but I've worn myself out trying to deploy Crystal .NET reports to my server (unsuccessfully).After looking around at a couple of other reporting apps -- eg, ActiveReports and ASPReports -- I'm startled at all the steep prices.My two questions are these:#1. Does anybody know of any reporting shareware for SQL Server?#2. If I want to start hand-making reports in SQL Server, what would be a viable approach? (My reporting needs are basic stuff like detail/grouping, running totals, etc.)I'm thinking maybe I should start by building some views with subqueries in them?? Any general ideas?Thanks in advance.Tim |
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robvolk
Most Valuable Yak
15732 Posts |
Posted - 2002-09-25 : 21:52:20
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| If you really need good-looking reports on the web, Crystal Reports really is the best way to go, especially if you already got used to them! Doing them by hand with custom HTML is rough, unless you love doing the code (I do it this way myself, but the reports are usually exremely simple) See if their tech support guys can get you set up right if you haven't tried them yet.The old ADO Recordset had a SHAPE command that made hierarchies and master/detail easy to query. And you could convert the recordset to XML; adding some XSL to transform it would've let you do some nice reports in HTML (I tried it a number of times, it was excellent, but XSL got to be too complicated for me) I don't know if ADO.Net has the SHAPE command, but since it's very easy to turn SQL Server data into XML you can probably do it the same way. I know the DataGrid has a ton of formatting options that might help too. Running totals and such can be done using the XML methods to traverse the data, or, there's also a running total article here:http://www.sqlteam.com/item.asp?ItemID=3856If you want to get summary info in a result set, look in Books Online under CUBE and ROLLUP, they'll help a bit. Also look at the FOR XML clause, if you have SQL Server 2000. There might be some more reporting stuff in SQL Team's Tools section:http://www.sqlteam.com/FilterTopics.asp?TopicID=122 |
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TimSinnott
Starting Member
48 Posts |
Posted - 2002-09-25 : 22:15:33
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| Wow! :) Thanks for the excellent info, Rob.I sure came to the right place!I'd forgotten all about Rollup and Cube. I look at those again.I've never seen FOR XML, so I'll look at that.And thanks for those excellent links.Man, you know your stuff. Many thanks!Tim |
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