Dostes Arnaud:
>I once tried generating reports using Servlets.
>My boss made me let go of Java and told me to use
>Seagate Crystal Reports to generate reports and it
>worked great. It only took me half a day to perform
>that task, and I estimate that it would have taken
>me days to get a not as good result using JAVA.
>
>Most people on this list are Java Evangelists, but
>face it people, starting something from scratch
>when the solution already exists is a great loss of
>time. Even if it's commercial and not Java powered (argh!)
>
>Only barrier, Crystal Reports is very expensive.
It depends on what you're trying to do. Crystal is well-known in the
Windows world. The drawback is that it only runs under Windows. It can
also be extremely slow if the query is somewhat complex (the simple
workaround is of course to create a view in the database and run the query
against it).
There are report generators that are equal to or better than Crystal -
there is no need to code all that oneself.
Have you, by any chance, tried using Crystal's API to integrate the report
engine into your own application? The ActiveX examples only show
VisualBasic code. That's for good reason. It's next to impossible to make
that control do what you want from any other language, including Visual
C++. The 'C'-based DLL API is extremely complex to use if your reports
contain anything but the simplest of things. For one thing, you need to
use the API to traverse the components of the report and manually chain
them together, regardless of what you've specified in the report designer.
How one would go about and use the thingie from Java is beyond me.
Come to think of it, Crystal Reports suck. I can safely say that, having
used the product from various languages since version 4.
But I agree with you on one point, though - there's no reson to take the
hard route and generate reports manually in code. I disagree that Crystal
Reports is the anwser, though.
/Robert
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