This is the fourth in a series of reviews that will cover what is contained in the DevExpress DXperience Universal Edition. This is the most complete of the subscription packages available from DevExpress. The other packages include Enterprise, WinForms, and ASP.NET. For a matrix of what each package contains, check out their edition page. In this review I will examine what is available for working with Reporting, Charting, and Printing.
While parts or all of these three suites can come with other subscriptions, each of these are available as standalone products. They provide a central hub for creating output for your data. The output can be in the form of reports, charts, and data that can be sent to HTML pages, PDF files, Rich Text Files, as well as to printers, as well as other formats.
XtraReports Suite
Reporting is not the most glamorous phase of application generation, but it still is one of the things that must be done. What makes it worse is that many systems have a desktop application that is separate from a Web-based application. You don't want to create two separate systems of the same report.
With XtraReports, you won't have to. With full Visual Studio.Net integration, you can build one report that can be used for either Windows Forms Application or ASP.NET.
Xtrareports uses the same code editor, the same Property Grid, the same component Toolbox, the same alignment toolbar, and ALL available Visual Studio IDE resources.
XtraReports only needs standard code files, which makes deployment a breeze for you and your team.
What do you get with DXperience XtraReports Suite?
• Full Visual Studio Integration gives you the leverage of working in the environment that you already know. If you know the VS IDE, then you know how to work in the XtraReports Designer. You get special interfaces elements, but they, too, work like the ones that you already know. When you create a report, the code behind is created so there is no additional external files to store your report definitions. And finally, you connect to your report in the same way you connect to your data in any other Windows Form's application.
.jpg?t=20120209092158)
Article comments
1 - Gavin
XtraReports is an excellent tool; I've used it for several web and winforms projects. The only thing that it -- along with many of its competitors -- doesn't have is a report server. You're expected to build it yourself.
After hunting, I found a report server that will handle reports created with any report designer for .NET, including XtraReports. Check out versareports.com for their product, Universal Report Server.