Why Crystal reports, why not Active reports?

[Former Member]

HI,

I need to know the advantages of crystal reports over Active reports. Please share your experience and knowledge on this topic.

Regards,

Abhi

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

As i review Active reports, it occurs to me that Active reports layout is very much similar to .net or vbnet layout.

So first thing it is very user friendly for vb and .net forms or application developers.

Secondly, its about the fixed page layout. which makes it very dependent upon the Business requirements and can leverage a lot the options like "can grow" and "group" and limit on page numbers and size.

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Danish

ActiveReports is a .net reporting tool that supports both vb.net and c# programming languages.  i am not sure what you meant by '.net/vbnet layout'.

Fixed Page Layout (FPL) report type has been introduced with ActiveReports 7 that was released last year. The traditional banded list reporting is still there (from previous versions of AR).  The term 'Section Report' is used to refer to the traditional banded list reporting style.  We also have full support for RDL(SSRS) reports that can be taken as-is and run with ActiveReports engine. 

I would recommend that you download and check it out for yourself.  Some more info.

Videos to get started:

• Video - Quick Start Part 1
• Video - Quick Start Part 2
• Video - What’s New in ActiveReports 7

Take a look at the following resources for more information:

• ActiveReports Product Information
• ActiveReports Documentation
• ActiveReports Blog

Take a look at the following documentation topics to start using ActiveReports today:

• Get Started with ActiveReports
• Create a Basic End User Report Designer
• Create Interactive Reports: Bookmarks, Drill-down, Drill-through
• Work with Data in Page Reports
• Work with Data in Section Reports
• Export a Report
• Customize, Localize, and Deploy Applications
• Learn about ActiveReports and the Web

[Former Member]

Thanks everyone..

[Former Member]

Abhishek

Would you be able to explain some more about your use case?  What areas of the products do you want to compare?

-rajnish

[Former Member]

Hi,

If you can tell us a bit about Active reports then we'd be glad to share comparison matrix based on the same w.r.t Crystal Reports.

-Prathamesh

[Former Member]

Hi Prathamesh,

This is new to me as well. You can get the details at below link:

http://www.gcpowertools.com/Products/ActiveReports/Overview

Regards,

Abhi

[abhilash_kumar]

Looks very much like Crystal Reports to me, except for the fact that it offers greater integration with .Net (my guess).

We can't really say one tool is better than the other without having spent considerable amount of time on each of the tools. You'll need to wait until someone who has worked on both Active Reports and Crystal Reports looks at this thread.

-Abhilash

[Former Member]

Hi Abhilash,

You are right! I too don't find any difference, but the thing is that the crystal report is costlier than Active reports. So, as a user it is good to know the advantage of one over another.

Regards,

Abhi

[former_member183750]

If you will be working with VS .NET 2010 / 2012, then CR is actually free for those versions of VS. You can download it here:

http://scn.sap.com/docs/DOC-7824

- Ludek

Senior Support Engineer AGS Primary Support, Global Support Center Canada

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[Former Member]

Hi Ludek,

what about enterprise edition?

-Abhi

[former_member183750]

Enterprise edition meaning?

- Ludek

[Former Member]

Hi Ludek,

I mean User licence cost.

-Abhi

[Former Member]

Hi Ludek,

Please post the functionality difference as well. If anything is there that can be done with CR but not with AR, performance of which one is good etc..

-Abhi

[abhilash_kumar]

Hi Abhi,

Like Ludek said, CR is Free for Visual Studio.

It'll be difficult for us to post functionality differences as first of all Active Reports is not an SAP product and secondly most of us here have never worked on it.

Your questions can only be answered by someone who has good experience with both the tools. You can also get some cues by watching videos from AR and there are many CR videos too - that could be a good way to decide for yourself.

-Abhilash

[former_member183750]

I agree with Abhilash

You will have to do the comparison your self. Re. Enterprise edition /  User licence cost. Perhaps you could be a bit more wordy / don't be so mysterious / take a bit of time to explain in detail why you are asking what you are asking. What will be the end product of what you want to do? Else, you may want to call sales and see what they tell you. Sales number: 866-681-3435

- Ludek