[2005] Need help decide on technology to use

[MrNorth]

Hi!

I am starting to develop a web based system that is to be used for managing consultant profiles e.g. their skills and employment history. The application is used by both consultants (to add their information, like education, courses, picture, employment history etc) and the sellers to manage the different consultants and the most important thing, to print a consultant profile report as a pdf. For example, if a highly skilled consultant has experience in both technical project management and programming, ánd a customer is looking for a programmer, the idea is that the seller can generate a profile with only the information relevant to the programming aspect and print it and hand it over to the customer.

Anyway, I need some advice on the tecniques to use for this project. My plan is this:

1) Data
I will use a SQL Server 2005 database

2) Data tier
I will use the table adapter architecture as the Data objects

3) Presenation
Will use ASP.NET for presentation

4) Reporting
I have no idea really. Are there any free tools? I have some experience with crystal reports. The report has the following requirements:

1) Show pictures from database
2) Align text like an asp.net repeater (one record at a time from a data source)
3)Support different kinds of layout and repeating of data, like bullets and numbering.

Is this doable in a free version of crystal or ms reporting services? This is really the only part I am not sure about.

I ahve worked with asp.net for 5 years so im fairly skilled, but have done very little with reporting. Wanted to ask the experts here before deciding the time frame for the project. I figure it would take 1 dev working 100 % about 200 hours to develop this including tests.

please tell me your ideas
Henrik

[Hack]

Here is an article you might find interesting.

[mendhak]

#2 is a bad idea - it's equivalent to not having a data layer at all. Create your own data access classes with methods in them and use those methods. Forget about the tableadapter and *datasources if you want to do this right.

#4 - Reporting is always a pain. I've learned from SSRS and CR and now always create reports by simply giving the user a custom ASP.NET page. So much more control. Reports limit you to what the reports... limit you to. But an ASP.NET is simply anything you want and how flexible you make it to display the data.

[MrNorth]

Hi!

Thanks for your input, another person in our team is currently working on the reporting part, but when I am finished with data and bll I will assist him.

The problem with using an asp.net page are

1) The user want to print and export as pdf, this means using 3rd party tools. The MS reporting module has this built in.

2) If you need to show graphs you will need a 3rd party tool to display this. We have no such thing in the budget, and are rather limited in our choices The customer is currently on a pie chart bonanza.


I fully admit that the reporting tool has it's weaknesses. When working with it's winforms counterpart I had to make a support class that edited the xml template at runtime to cope with our needs (say no more). This because there is NO object model to work with the reports at runtime. And sometimes there are things you don't know at runtime, like dynamically rendered tables.

kind regards

[mendhak]

Well, if you have the time, then using a third party control to generate the PDF is a small token for long term benefits. I guess each team and organization will have its own preferences, but to me the cons outweigh the pros here.

[MrNorth]

Hi again

We finanly reached the phase in the project where we implement the reports.

After working with MS Reporting for a day, its already driving me nuts. Not only does it make the Develoepr Studio UI all crazy, it has some serious limitations when working with objectdatasources.

So I was thinking... Since I ahve all the content for the report in a panel, it is really easy to use the InnerHtml method to get the html string for this, and then pass it to some pdf generating component. Do you know of any component that accepts a html string and renders a pdf? It would be nice if I could specify header/footer also since this report will be used by some high ranking ppl, and they want their reports to look good.

It doesn't matter if the component cost money, just as long as there are no limitations in the trial (we can live with water stamps)... but of course free is nice...

kind regards
Henrik

[mendhak]

As far as my experience goes, I know of iTextSharp (free) and ABC WebSuperGoo (not free) both of which should accept HTML and convert to PDF. Both of these have documentation that exist which you can browse through as well before you start playing around. ABC WebSuperGoo should also have a trial version available.