Re: Report writers... information please!

Depends on what type of capability you need in a report writer. Some report writers are very cheap, others are very expensive. The reason we went with a 3rd party report writer is that our databases are backends and our front ends are PCs with Windows... So the choice was pretty clear that we needed to go "3rd party". Anyway... The Windows Report writers that I have experienced so far are CRYSTAL REPORTS PRO v2.0 and PowerBuilder's Built-in Datawindow report writer.

Of course, PowerBuilder is an all around Development tool and Crystal Reports is "just a report writer". After writing a few reports on PowerBuilder v3.0 and about 20 on Crys Rpt Pro v2.0, I have to say unequivocably that I hate PB's DataWindow generator for writing reports. The reason is that Crystal Reports has a really excellent expression language for computed fields. Its its own language where you can declare variables and then call them in other places... You can do just about any normal programming in a calculated/computed field on Crystal Reports making it extremely flexible. PowerBuilder on the other hand seems to only accept a normal expression for a computed field... And whats worse, (Maybe I havent figured this out yet), even though I NAME a computed field on PowerBuilder, I cant use the results of the computed field to make another computed field! What a waste! Frequently in reports you want to do a simple calculations and some complex ones that use the previous simple calculation. It really sucks that you have to retype the whole calculation.

Case in point... Doing a complex calc on a line itme in PowerBuilder requires you (From what I can see so far) to make the computed field..But then if you want to sum the computed field, you have to make another computed field and retype the whole expression in such a way as to use the sum's of the real fields that are on the detail line. This leaves room for extra mistakes and is just plain annoying. As a FORM'S creater, PB is pretty good in its data Window painter compared to some, but as a report writer...

Crystal Reports on the other hand is built for that sort of thing. And the new v3.0 just came out from what I understand which has added even more features.

The only problem I have so far with Crystal Reports is that it can not report on the output of a Stored Procedure. PowerBuilder can. IMO, I need this feature a lot (reporting off of stored procedures) because there are things that just can not be done with views and tables.

I am aware though that there are a lot of 3rd party windows report writers out now or due to come out...So it looks like there's a definate market for them.

Later,
  Gunther Received on Mon Dec 06 1993 - 03:38:19 CET