I am working on Visual Studio 2010 , developing a windows app.
I want to create some simple reports. I am confused about which reports should I use in the application.
The reports which are available in the Visual Studio or the crystal reports.
what are the advantage of report over each other ?
I am working on reports after long time so, can I get some simple links, so I can understand workflow of it.
Crystal Reports seems well documented, more ressources available than Microsoft Reporting
Huge API in CR (just try to print a Microsoft Reporting-report without preview, that's ridiculous!)
Crystal Reports somehow slower than Microsoft Reporting with huge amount of data
Designing reports against custom BusinessObjects is really worse (Wizard isn't even able to "see" objects in another project!) in Crystal Reports
Crystal Reports's preview integration into our apps is much better than in Microsoft Reporting (just try to make your own toolbar!)
Microsoft Reporting's integration in the dev environment is superior to CR (which's habit to implement it's own DB-connection is bad taste)
Both seem to lack designers, our users can use at runtime from within our apps (not external!) to manipulate reports which we prefer to store in the DB (seems to be quite easy with Microsoft Reporting as it's only XML to be stored!) for better managability and deployment.
Related
I'm newbie to Crystal Reports and would like to know, which way to go.
My challenge:
A web-service consumer asks for a PDF on a specific report (name of RPT-file).
The called web-service shall generate report output as PDF and send it to the consumer.
The machine, where the service shall run, has an installed service "SAP Crystal Reports Server 2016".
Actually I'm using Visual Studio 2019 and "Crystal Reports for Visual Studio 13 SP27".
I'm thinking of an implementation in C#.
I tried lots of examples but none seems to be basis for my challenge.
Am I on the correct track?
Any hint is welcome...
I'm working for a company which maintain several Desktop application projects written in C++. All of these apps have complex GUI interfaces. What I mean by "complex" is, among others, interfaces with many components, deep component hierarchy, usage of frames, third party and/or custom component packages which support features like transparency and animation.
Until now we always used the Embarcadero RAD Studio suite to write and maintain our apps. However the many recurring bugs of each new version has tired my superiors, and now they are considering the possibility to migrate to Visual Studio.
I think that migrate the application core functions written in c++ will not be a real issue.
However for the GUI it's an other story. I had a previous experience with complex interfaces under the Visual Studio 2003 compiler, and I remember that this was a painful work to create and maintain them. There was no real designer, components were limited, and a huge part of the job was to be done manually. From that I took a look on the designing tools provided with Visual Studio 2017, and my first impression is that not much has changed since. The designer for c++ projects is still so rudimentary, especially in comparison to the RAD Studio VCL, with its well-supplied component library. The C# API is closer than what I need, but I cannot envisage to rewrite all my code in C# as a serious option.
I tried to search tutorials about the good practices to apply in a such situation, but until now I found no helpful info.
My questions are:
Can I recover my current GUI interface, at least a part of it, while I migrate to Visual Studio, or do I have to plan to rewrite everything from scratch?
Does Visual Studio provide a mechanism similar to VCL for composing GUI interfaces, installing third parties packages and writing custom components? And if yes, where can I find relevant info about that?
Is a such port possible without a high dose of headache and tears? Where can I found relevant info about a such process?
I am also currently working on a product which is developed using Embarcadero RAD Studio and some 3rd party UI controls. Development was done many years back, so its UI is quite older style. I tried to migrate it in Visual Studio, by developing application logic in C++ and UI in C#(WPF). But it is as good as writing new application, cost is more. So we discontinued that exercise. However what I learned during this is –
Migrating VCL application from RAD Studio to Visual Studio is like writing new application. There is no one-to-one mapping(data types, stuctures, UI controls etc), you have start from scratch. Also there are no tools available which can help this migration.
Some data types, data structures, UI controls are easily available in RAD Studio, which are not available in Visual C++ (MFC), and vice versa. So you have to review every code line while migrating the application logic.
There are no 3rd party UI controls available for Visual C++(MFC) which can make your life easy. For RAD Studio you have LMD tools, businessSkinForms etc.
After working on RAD Studio over 5+ years, Developing UI is quite easy in RAD Studio (UI in C++). However in Visual Studio you can develop your UI in C#(WPF) which will be rich and can communicate with application logic written in C++.
As you said, you have several desktop applications developed with RAD Studio, while migrating to Visual Studio start with smaller and standalone application. So you will get some confidence during migration of this application and then you can put such migrated small application in production one by one without impact.
~Nilesh
I have a VB6 app which connects to either a SQL Server or Oracle Database. It includes some Crystal Reports, made with an old version (CR 8.5).
I'm working on upgrading the Crystal viewer to CR 2008 (using Interop Forms Toolkit).
Everything is working fairly well, but I am seeing a few reports which are painfully slow to appear. Other reports are perfectly fine.
I would appreciate any tips for things to look at that would cause a crystal report to appear quickly in the CR 8.5 preview window, but slowly in the CR 2008 preview window.
The most recent Crystal reports version supported by VB6 is Crystal XI. I know that you can create a COM object in .NET and call it from VB6 , but this will not change the fact that Crystal 2008 is not supported. Sooner or later you will hit a report where the VB6 app will have issues, which you cannot resolve . To check if this is the case for the current reports create a temp .NET project and run one of them. If the report works fine obviously the issue is VB6. Of course there might be other reasons for the slow reports. Did you change the machine where you are running them ? If yes , do you have the same printers installed and the same drives (including mapped drives) on the new machine?
P.S. Actually to test the report in .NET you don't need to create a project. It will be easier if you download one the existing .NET Crystal viewers on the market. Usually they have trial mode , which will be enough for your test. Let me know if this will work better for you , I can post some links
Here's something that vastly sped up the processing (previewing or printing of the reports):
Open the report in the Crystal 2008 editor
Database menu, select "Verify Database"
Save
Doing that changed some fields from "PersistentMemoField" to "StringField", and removed some "DatabaseName" values. Anyway, I'm happy with the results.
What is the difference between Query Studio and Report Studio in Cognos?
Could anyone explain me in detail?
Thanks in advance.
Query studio is lightweight add hoc web report writer that allows semi-power users to build ad-hoc reports via the Cognos web portal using prepared data content published to the web portal. Users can sort/filter change font size, do some grouping and aggregation... and save their reports. How ever this report writer is lightweight in that you don't have strong capabilities over presentation format and layout.... in comes report studio which is the enterprise report development tool which can develop pixel perfect reports that have a high degree of interactivity complex condition/conditional layout processing etc... Report studio can edit query studio reports as well. So sometimes users save their Query studio reports but ask for developers to tweak them to get desired appearance/functionality. Both application generate XML files that are stored in the Cognos Repository.
I'm currently investigating my options to run automated tests from within Visual Studio 2008 Professional. I noticed that the MSDN page documenting the integrated funcionality is only available for VS 2008 and VS 2005. This kind of makes me suspcious. Since we are planning to upgrade to VS 2010 I'm wondering whether I will able to continue to use my configurations and knowledge with VS 2010? Does anyone here have made any experience with this?
TIA, Thomas
No need to be nervous, the terminology around the test configuration has merely changed in VS 2010. Most of what you know is the same but resides under different product branding which causes some versioning problems in the documentation.
Most notably, "test configuration" is often referred to as "test settings" under 2010.
Microsoft moved away from silo-ed "Team Test" terminology of VS 2005/2008 to a more holistic big picture known as Microsoft Application Lifetime Management, where testing is an integrated component for delivery of successful applications. Keep in mind that most of the documentation you'll find for testing refers to the Test Manager, which ship with the Ultimate and Test editions of Visual Studio. The Test Manager ties Tests to Use Cases and Requirements and is part of that big picture.
If you're not going down the ALM big picture, the focused view of just running tests hasn't changed much at all, with the exception of some new features like Test Impact which are pretty cool.
The following links may be useful to you, as it sounds like you're interested in how the tests can be used by developers or part of your build process:
Running Automated Tests within Visual Studio
Running Automated Tests from the Command-line
Hope that helps!