I'm looking into upgrading a .net 2.0 app. The app is used by the public authorities of a certain city to keep track of expenses and generate reports and forms.
The reports and forms were generated in VS2005 using Crystal report. They follow a well defined layout, like official documents usually do.
I am looking at options to upgrade the application and the main problem I have is in determining how to deal with the crystal report files.
I have successfully upgraded to VS2008, but any version after that doesn't have CR anymore, so my company would have to pruchase CR separately and because the client and my company are both tight, I'm looking at alternatives...
The obvious one is using SSRS. I have never touched it before in my life, but after playing around with it for a bit, I get the impression that it is not very well suited to generating forms with lots of non-tabular content and lots of formatting. Or am I wrong?
It seems that every line has to be drawn separately. There is no (that I can see) accurate way of positioning lines for formatting...
But I'm just a beginner, so I might be getting this all wrong?
If that is the case, are there any other alternatives to CR and SSRS?
I was thinking of maybe having a separate MVC web site project in the solution. Have that generate the layout in html and css with data from my entity model, then view the result in a (built-in or not) web browser. Am I overcomplicating on this?
I really need advice from somebody who's done that kind of thing before.
What SSRS is good for:
Talking to SQL Server, much faster than other products as it in many cases retains the database better when in other programs IMHO they repeat query at times.
Designing collapsable grids and chart objects from datasets. You can have 'groups' that can nest aggregates of collapsed values and can be un collapsed or collapsed on demand based on expressions, parameters, or a recusive parent set.
A web service for deployment ease where you can deploy one or many objects. You can also write add ons for this service with C# and the ReportingService.asmx web service.
You can talk to the web service directly in a 'form' object in HTML and manipulate it's output.
You can schedule reports to send out via email and file saves automatically to clients or internal users.
What SSRS IS NOT GOOD FOR:
It is not event driven hardly at all except for parameters. You cannot click on many things and get other parts on the form itself to update. You may do an 'action' that goes to another location, report, or site. But in essence you are calling a seperate object, not the same instance again.
Multiple layers of reporting. Beyond tweaking tool tips you cannot do 'hover over' reporting without hacking SSRS. You can make javascript windows show other reports but it is not baked in to SSRS. So you are either clicking into new reports or tab stops in a report but not getting hover over quick objects beyond text and expressions that are in tool tips.
What do you want before considering what you need to impement?
I want to input and export things while talking to my database - ASP.NET with potentially HTML 5 or MVC4 if you want to be very new. ASP.NET is made for actively talking to a server and taking commands IN as well as OUT.
I want a form to auto update periodically on a page as a landing site and dashboard - AJAX and Javascript on top of HTML, Java or ASP.NET.
I want to create reports that exist on a Server and can be hosted on a wide variety of platforms in .NET via web service calls - SSRS.
SSRS's biggest selling point to me is it's reusability once you dial a report in. They are pretty easy to create, easy to configure, easy to deploy, and if you get a little advanced in calling the webservice you can get SSRS report objects in other technologies if you want.
There is Crystal reports for VS2010 and VS2012. It is just not shipped with them. You can download the installation from here: http://scn.sap.com/docs/DOC-7824
I am running through the same decision process at this time. There is a .NET product from a company called "Windward" that will allow you to design your reports in Microsoft Office. If you are in the MS ecosystem already or want your users to design reports instead of always calling on you, this might help.
Their template design tool is called AutoTag and you can deploy these template to their .NET based engine in a few lines of code.
I know the question is regarding SSRS vs. Crystal comparison but thought you should know there are other alternatives and some can make life easier
Ryan
Related
In Microstrategy 9.4.1 i created a dashboard from the web and then i tryed to edit it from the desktop and i got the following message
this analysis will be converted to a document and the change cannot be undone. are you sure?
I could read on the MSTR site that the difference between Dashboards and Documents is the following:
Document is a editing and formatting of report in a prescribed manner. where as Dashboard is a output result of Document. Dashboard is a Graphical view of Report in Flash mode and it is more interactive.
I want to say also that Documents and Dashboard are two different kind of object, they also have two different icons.
Why while editing a Document from the desktop suite i have more option than from the web?
Can I Edit a Dashboard from the desktop suite? If not, why?
Quite long, go to the end for the quick answers.
Probably there is a bit of confusion on the MicroStrategy documentation because of the history of the terms Documents and Dashboard and how they were used.
In the past, MicroStrategy had only Reports (also called Datasets when used to provide data for a Document or a Dashboard) and Documents.
A MicroStrategy Documents allowed to do more fancy stuff, use data from multiple Reports (or Datasets), more formatting options (headers and footers), show more graphs or grids on the same screen, use Autotext fields (like to automatically show the current date, the prompt answers used, the name of the user running the document), and other thing that I forget now, but I think you got the idea.
Documents could be used to generate those huge PDF reports that nobody was going to read. Then the Business Intelligence world went frenzy for the dashboard thing.
MicroStrategy Documents were perfect for that, you just needed to have the whole document in a single screen and you had a perfect dashboard done with MicroStrategy.
Of course we are talking now about the time when people started to look at their data without printing them, maybe publishing them on the company intranet or some primitive websites.
MicroStrategy embraced this internet revolution offering the possibility to create flash based Documents and the possibility to edit them directly in your browser. I do suspect that at this point MicroStrategy Desktop and the Web editor were quite aligned in terms of functionality (even if sometimes it was hard to find that specific thing: i.e. if you have to format a graph in web you can do it only in the editable mode?)
Release after release the two environments become two different beasts and now some options are available only in one of them (i.e. sorting selector values). Sometimes it seems to me they lost part of the source code of MicroStrategy Desktop so they can do new things only in web. I'm joking :)
Back to dashboards, some of them were nice, most of them were so so (and people started to write about how to show your data in a better way). The main problem is that they are very nice to show data to big bosses, but they have really little value for operation people.
To tackle this problem new tools started to show up, tools to do easily data discovery, data visualization, data analysis, you name it. There were a number of new companies (QliK, Tableau) with new solutions. Initially they were doing just a slice of what a big BI tool was doing but people could use them knowing little or nothing of SQL, Data Warehousing and ETL and they were also looking cool too.
After a while MicroStrategy realized that they needed a cool tool to do the same things if they didn't want to fall behind, so with version 9.2 MicroStrategy announced his own tool for data analysis: MicroStrategy Visual Insight.
MicroStrategy Visual Insight was included with the standard user licenses, had a flash based engine and it was working only on web (and mobile).
Finally in version 9.4 MicroStrategy renamed Visual Insight MicroStrategy Dashboard.
TL;DR:
It's true often you can do a thing in desktop, but you can't do it in MicroStrategy web, or vice versa. Unfortunately nobody knows why.
MicroStrategy Dashboards can be edited only in web because they are flash based.
I am building a publicly facing website that does the following.
Users log in.
And then view a list of their customers.
They click on a customer to view their past purchases, order them, change them etc.
This is not a shopping site by the way.
It is a simple look up tool.
Note that none of the data accessed by the website is in anything other than a SQL database - no office documents. Also, the login does not use users Windows credentials on a VPN or something like that.
Typically I would build this using a standard ASP.NET MVC website.
However the client says they want to use Sharepoint.
As I understand it, Sharepoint is used for workflow and websites that are collaboration tools such as the components you can see here http://www.sharepointhosting.com/sharepoint-features.html
Here are my questions:
Would I be right in saying that WSS is completely inappropriate for this task as it comes with an overhead that provides no benefits?
If I had to use it, would I need WSS or MOSS?
If I had to use it, would I be right in saying the site would consist of :
List item
a) Web Parts
b) And a custom site layout. How do I create one of these?
Addendum:The book Professional SharePoint 2007 Web Content Management Development looks like a good start
1.) I agree that SharePoint would be quite inappropriate for this task. A few reasons:
It costs thousands of dollars to license SharePoint for use on the open Internet
SharePoint will use a lot of resources (SQL Server, IIS, Active Directory...) that are unnecessarily demanding for your task
SP will give you very little flexibility to develop a solution in your way -- it sounds like you would need to create a database-connected Web Part in ASP.NET anyway (so that could be entirely independent of SP)
SharePoint has it's place--it can be remarkably helpful as a company's internal document management, intranet, and workflow/approval system--but it is not well suited for custom code nor Internet use.
2.) I believe MOSS would be required for the Internet license (as in the link above).
3.) SP development is not like typical relation database systems (for example, it uses flat, unnormalized tables). If your SQL matched the SharePoint way of thinking, you might be able to connect to your database as an external List using SharePoint Designer. More likely you would need to use Visual Studio to create a custom Web Part in ASP.NET.
Hopefully this'll be a few reasonable arguments you can use to help the customer see how SharePoint is inappropriate for the task... In fact, I expect just the first point (the cost of licensing) will turn them.
You can technically use WSS for this task but MOSS has more features aimed at building public facing websites. The publishing infrastructure comes to mind. It has has the CQWP which enables you to build custom interfaces which perform well in SharePoint. With SharePoint there are potentially challenges around scalability. If you know the platform well then doing something like what you have suggested would be a pretty quick task. If you don't know SharePoint and the underlying system well you could face challenges.
You do not want to approach building the final application with SharePoint Designer. It has behavior which can cause major problems with scalability. You want to create a SharePoint Solution comprising a number of features which can be easily deployed to SharePoint. Going this route does not alleviate performance problems but you are going to be closer to the right solution. You can package up the custom user interface elements as CQWPs or write Web Parts. I personally prefer to write Web Parts.
You do the overall site design in a Master Page. Pages within a site are then inheriting from this. If you have MOSS then you can create what are called publishing pages which contain your Web Parts. These are not available in WSS which is why people recommend against it for public websites.
To decide whether SharePoint (any version) is worth it, you need to find out if they are going to use any of the core features. If everything is going to be custom and you are not going to make use of any workflow or document management features in your deployment then I would stay away. To see whether you want to go further with SharePoint from a development perspective, take a look at the WSS developer labs. I recently ran an intro course at my employer using the materials from that site. They are dated, and need more info on best practices but they provide a quick way for you to dip a toe in the water and decide whether you want to go any further.
1) For the core functionality as you describe it SharePoint isn't going to add anything, BUT if you build it on SharePoints premisses it allows your client to add a lot of functionality outside the core for "free" like:
They can add Content Editor WebParts to pages where they can add descriptions, and messages
They can add lists where the customers can enter requests/comments/... and automatically have new entries mailed to anyone in the organisation subscribing to changes
The functionality you develop can be reused on their intranet
Any future small "web apps" can be included in the same site
...
So all in all unless you have a better framework to use then use SharePoint
2) WSS is all you need for now
3) Your main deliverable for now would be:
a feature with some Site Pages and a few Web Parts
a feature with a custom masterpage and corresponding css
True. Well not inappropriate but it doesn't add anything either.. but maybe in the future?
WSS is enough
You'd need web parts to expose your data, yes. The custom site layout is not necessary. If you want your own look and feel a SharePoint Theme may suffice. Even if you want some real custom layout tweaks you probably don't need a site template but you can get away with using just SharePoint Designer to edit the pages or master page.
I have a requirement to select some data from a table in a database (SQL Server) and display it on a page in a SharePoint site (MOSS 2007).
I have a little bit of experience of MOSS, so I know I have a couple of options:
BDC
SSRS
or possibily even a custom ASPX page.
I've never really worked with any of these. Can anyone advise on the +/-'s of each?
It all depends on what functionality is required once the table is displayed in SharePoint. Do you need extra bells and whistles or is a dump of the data adequate? (Think about the future as well.) Here's some thoughts...
Business Data Catalog (BDC)
If you want to nicely integrate the SharePoint look and feel with your data as well as get some cool functionality, BDC is a good solution. There is no need to program anything and these are the features you get. However if this data will only be used once in one way then it is probably overkill.
You would need to roll your own XML description of the data so SharePoint knows how to pull it from the database (or use something third party like Lightning Tools). As Colin mentioned it requires the Enterprise license of MOSS.
SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS)
If Reporting Services is already available for use then this is the quickest and simplest solution. It works well but can get painful as more advanced features are required in your reports.
You should be able to use the Report Designer wizard to point to your table and set everything up for you. There are SSRS web parts that can be used within SharePoint, or indeed you can run SSRS inside SharePoint using SharePoint integration mode.
Application Page
This method Steven mentioned lets you integrate an ASP.NET application into SharePoint (such that it can be accessible by a URL within your SharePoint site). This allows anything that ASP.NET does, and the code-behind will be aware of SharePoint so you can tap into that if needed as well. The cons here are code access security and deployment.
See this webcast for how to do it.
Web Part
Similar to developing an application page but much more integrated with SharePoint. A custom web part is very powerful and allows you to integrate ASP.NET code on a SharePoint page. As you would know web parts can be dragged to whatever location and give a consistent properties pane. Again, code access security and deployment needs to be considered.
If you like designer view in Visual Studio then be aware this isn't the approach that Microsoft push. You can however use something like SmartPart where you would develop your custom app as a user control and the SmartPart wraps it into a web part. I'm used to doing it the MS way now and actually prefer the additional control this gives, however it can take more time.
Page Viewer Web Part
If you don't want to touch your SharePoint installation at all then have a look at this web part. It takes a URL as parameter and displays an IFrame containing the page that would be your report, either in SSRS or standard ASP.NET.
The downside from this lack of integration is problems with sizing the IFrame, and possible security warnings from the browser if accessing the URL in a different domain.
Don't forget the DataView Webpart. It has a pretty small developement footprint and works really well as a first "cut" if you are unsure as to how hardcore you need the final result to be.
It renders using XSLT, giving you full control of the final HTML, so it can do some pretty things with Javascript and co.
For a very simple example of charting.
Have you ever used the .NET Framework do develop webpages?
MOSS 2007 uses this framework for master / template files.
So your best choice would be to create an ASPX template file to display the results on the webpage.
BDC is the way to go if you want to keep it "strictly Sharepoint". The problem is, it is only included in the Enterprise edition of SharePoint. If you have the Standard edition, you could go for SSRS and the SSRS webpart, or, create your own webpart. That way you can use your data display anywhere in your site and it's also ASP.NET compatible.
As Nat said - if all that is needed is to display some data from a database on a page - the DVWP is a great solution. Just open your page in SharePoint Designer, add the database connection, and drop the web part on your page. You can use any of the several pre-formatted layouts, or design/tweak your own so the data is displayed as you need.
Relatively straightforward, lots of HowTos online, and far faster/easier to setup than something like BDC.
Report design, generation and maintenance isn't hard, but it is dull. We have a number of legacy (to quite different degrees of legacy) reports in Crystal Reports XI. These are designed for A4/PDF - not necessarily printed, but to be of a predictable layout and there's no possibility of us retiring them any time soon.
All connect to existing stored procedures (SQL Server 2005) to acquire their data. A lot of time has been sunk in getting these reports to look just so. The actual creation of reports is mostly done via the .NET/C# API and exported to PDF. There are a number of locally developed and maintained applications that are stable and handle this process well.
So we like the fact that Crystal Reports is stable, that our apps produce these reports reliably, that the PDF output is consistent and that when the Crystal Reports template is approved and set, it just works.
There are some big problems with this situation though. The biggest being that any changes to the underlying report templates themselves are a huge pain; getting the Crystal Reports template to a point that users are happy is a royal hassle and can involve a long iteration of DTP/graphics/database/reconciliation and myriad other niggles.
Combine that with Crystal Reports being a relatively rare skill and not one people want to admit to, we are trying to think up alternative solutions.
Some thoughts I've started to consider - and any others welcome!
Does Crystal Reports 2008 offer any benefits over XI?
How have others managed a migration away from CR? And what to?
Given the data access layer is well formed, perhaps generate graphs via an Excel service and then import them as graphics to a framework template? Crystal, another - has anyone tried anything like this?
Is Reporting Services any better? (We have some RS skillz but again, another thing that people are loath to actually own up to knowing anything about.)
Are there any layout tools available (preferably with a .NET API) for what, in the old days, would be called Desktop Publishing? If we have graphics/tables/other objects as images that could then be rendering automatically,
Ideally I want to move to a solution where the users are in greater control of the underlying changes, and whether this can be handled programatically within tools that we can provide to them and so that I can be coding rather than editing Crystal Reports templates.
So what other problems are you having with Crystal? Sounds like you want the users to handle the reporting...(don't we all). The problem with that is they never want to use whatever data model is offered. Someone has to know how to query the database. You already have that by using stored procedures. Maybe let a couple users learn basic crystal principals (grouping, sorting, summing, etc) and you write the stored procedure and they format it with crystal. That way you bypass the biggest stumbling block with crystal, which is doing the table joins in crystal.
I have crystal knowledge and think it's fairly easy to use. I wouldn't call it skillz though, more like I know what it can and can't do, so I can save myself a lot of time.
I'm not trying to defend Crystal, but if it ain't broke...
We recently upgraded to VS 2008 on XP. Our users are still running the .NET 2.0 framework on Win2K, and a company-wide upgrade is not in our near future. What we didn't find out until we'd already upgraded from 2005 to 2008 is that the Crystal Reports redistributables that come with VS 2008 only work on XP or higher. Oops. So, we're now unable to edit our old reports because CR will automatically update it to the new version.
What I wound up doing is using our existing XMLSerializer, building a class that holds the report data (lots of string and List<T> properties, essentially), and serializing it to an XML file. Insert an XSL stylesheet declaration that transforms it to HTML/CSS, and open it in IE.
It's wound up being quite a bit faster than Crystal Reports, particularly for development, and I can typically have them just give me a Word document of whatever the hell they want the report to look like, export it as HTML, clean it up, and then use that as a template for what the XSL generates.
It's nowhere near as full-featured as Crystal Reports, but for what we need (XRay and Lab reports and work orders), it's perfect.
We have had SharePoint where I work for a little while now, but we've not done a lot with it. We have an intranet with hundreds of ASP/ASP.Net applications and I'm wondering what kind of things can be done to integrate with SharePoint to make a more seamless environment? We put documentation and production move requests and so on in SharePoint now, but it pretty much feels like it's own separate system rather than an integrated tool on our intranet.
I've searched around to see what other people are doing with SharePoint but I've been finding a lot of useless information.
A great idea for you would be move your most used asp.net apps to run within the SharePoint site. Each app can be added either as a control directly on a pagelayout or integrated into a webpart (use the webpart to load child controls).
This would allow you to use the flexible moss interface to move the asp.net app into a unified information architecture so people can find the app easily.
SharePoint is really easy to roll out something that works, but creating a seamless intranet does require a bit of thinking outside of SharePoint itself (i.e. what should go where, which users need to see what, navigation structure...)
That is really a lot of work and requires lots of input from people outside the IT area.
A typical intranet portal segments functionality by department. Each department will probably have some custom web-based apps that you might have historically implemented in ASP.Net, and linked to from the intranet portal. With sharepoint you can start bringing the useful bits of those custom web-apps in as modular parts, so that the business owner of the portal can have more control as to how information is structured and displayed to his/her users.
Think dashboards, populated with custom metrics that only make sense to individual departments. That's one of the most obvious places to start. HR, accounting, IT, they all have metrics they want to track and display. They all have legacy systems that they might want to correlate information from. All this can be done in reusable web-parts. Since Sharepoint gives the end-user the control over layout, display, audience control, etc, you don't end up reinventing wheels all day.
SharePoint was designed to be a collaboration portal and document repository. If you have other business processes wrapped up in other internal web sites, you may not get much benefit from converting these sites into SharePoint sub-sites.
However, if there is signifcant overlap in your applications (contact lists, inventory, specs, etc.) you may want to make the investment to combine.
If you have InfoPath, you can create online forms. You can share your docs and edit them online. You can start an approvement workflow on these docs. You can create polls. You can create work groups.
Basically SharePoint is a giant and robust document store, but you can do anything what you can do in any ASP.NET web application. You can create e.g. custom workflows to automate business processes. We've worked for several customers to create corporate intranets and sometimes internet sites, so it really works. :)
But sometimes it's very hard to implement the requested features (a lot of workarounds).
Really its an intranet in a box. We pretty much run all of our day to day development tasks off of it. We keep documentation, track defects, manage people's time off etc. You can migrate your asp.net and asp applications to run under the sharepoint site. In the adminstration section you can set up web applications to run under the same site, but outside of sharepoint's control. That would probably help with the "feel" of it being completely seperate.
Sharepoint is really a shift in the way people have to think about web development and that's the key. You're no longer developing a standalone application, you're adding on to an existing framework. I would put it akin to having "silos of data" vs. a centralized database system which houses all the company's data. Once people realize that everything is connected, it will feel more like a seemless integration. My advice is to actively try and create applications in sharepoint and think about how to migrate existing apps on to it.
How about BI and reporting from an ERP?
When we know IE is uncapable to handle a page with 10000 table rows (without pagination)
Many don't realize but the success of a reporting tool depends on the performance of the grid object used - Excel and the SpreadSheet obj from the defunct Office Web Components are still the #1 in user's (accountants, managers, ceo) choice.
I think it depends on your environment. In our environment, we setup each department with their own pages and we use it for basic information, surveys, and the employee's homepage. We've built Google/Live Search and Weather.com widgets and roll RSS feeds using Tim Huer's RSS control.
One thing you can do is to create web parts to provide access to data from existing applications. Initially they could simply be read-only views, but depending on your experience they could be fleshed out to allow writes.
Another idea is to add links between SharePoint and your applications (assuming they're web based); that will at least allow a flow between them.
I haven't done it, but you could also theoretically skin SharePoint to look like the rest of your intranet.
Create libraries
Form libraries, documents libraries, slide libraries
Create standard or custom lists
Standard lists - announcements, tasks, contacts
Custom lists - suppliers, contractors, inventories, orders
Setup secure team discussion areas
Build shared team calendars
Create simple workflow processes on documents and lists