|
When comparing efforts for developing reports with Crystal Reports and with Reporting Services, we need to consider two cases:
-
Reports designed for export into PDF, Excel etc;
-
Reports designed for viewing at the application and direct printing from the application.
Regarding #1, our experience says that efforts are completely the same. Both systems provide similar functionality to create reports. Your developers can create as complex reports as you need with the same efforts.
For developing reports viewed at the application, Reporting Services provides many ready-to-use functions that your developers need to implement when using Crystal Reports.
It is not necessary to take care of click-on-column sorting with Reporting Services. Your developers don't need to complicate the implementation by working out dynamic sorting. Reporting Services will do this.
Also you can get drill-downs in your reports without any coding. By default, a report will display you totals only, but upon clicking on report lines you'll get details on the same page without any reloading or hiding data already displayed.
However, the most outstanding feature provided by Reporting Services is the Report Builder. It allows business users to create their own reports with various data sources in terms of business not of coding. Your developers need only explain the system what business objects are. They can easily perform this interpretation using views (queries). After that, you can create as many reports as you need. You won't deal with any code. The Report Builder provides you a meccano for playing with your business objects. You can construct reports with any data sources and define report access permissions very easily.
Summing up, we can say that a typical report of moderate complexity can be developed by 20-30% faster using MS Reporting Services than Crystal Reports. The more complex a report gets, the more advantage of using MS Reporting Services over Crystal Reports.
|
