Sorry to resurrect the already established dead...
I'm adding in a summary to my report on CR technology, just to appease any doubts or possibilities of a switch should the arise.
Is this a fair assessment of the product.
Pros:
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- Have a visual report editor to make it fast and easy to create and modify reports.
- Generate highly presentable reports, both on the screen and when printed.
- Include the ability to generate grouped reports with graphs.
- Can Be a pure Java solution.
- Integrates nicely with Coldfusion MX via the CFREPORT tag. All indications state that CR Ent 10.0 is supported by CFMX 6.1
Cons:
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- No practical way to rapidly prototype reports for cases where the requirements are unclear or unstable. This discourages experimentation and lead to certain reports not adequately meeting the customers requirements
- Maintenance became very time-consuming as the schema changed and new features were introduced.
- Customization of the output of the reports for specific uses (e.g. printing) was time-consuming. It does not scale well for large datasets and a significant amount of work is required to address this deficiency.
Why Go with it?
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The biggest advantage was the speed and simplicity of creating visually appealing reports. An important factor contributing to the speed of creating reports is that the Crystal Reports visual editor makes it possible to design and edit reports without code / deployment issues.
An additional benefit is that the ease of creating and modifying reports means that the developer does not need to have expertise in Coldfusion MX, meaning that a larger pool of developers are available to work with the reports.
Other Products
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While Crystal Reports has a lot of features that most reporting tools today don't, one other consideration is the upcoming next release of Coldfusion MX 7.0, where its been said to have a similar "Crystal Reports Designer" tool along with additional formats (PDF & Flash). It also allows direct access to design via code such as Coldfusion MX + HTML solution, making report customization post deployment easier.
FOP is another potential solution, it requires some behind the scenes magic to translate HTML into a solution that can be converted to PDF, it too is JAVA based and has been known to hold up under large amounts of load. Customization is there, but does not have a visual editor like the other two. Its attraction is mainly its price tag, which from all indications state to be open source.
________________________________
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Sent: Wednesday, 8 December 2004 10:02 AM
To: CFAussie Mailing List
Subject: [cfaussie] Crystal Reports War Injuries.
Hi All,
I'm looking into using CFMX & Crystal Reports together, and I've noticed a lot of reading on "It's too hard". Who here uses the products together and can recommend any tips/pointers that may aid me.
*(Oh, before you ask. yes I know about Blackstone's CFDocument and No its not a solution *yet* I can use - ie alternatives are already known *FOP* etc).
--------------------------------------------------
Regards,
Scott Barnes
Senior Network Engineer
Goro Nickel Project
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