Choosing the right reporting tool

Question

I'm currently rewriting a legacy VB6/Access97 app to a new .NET/MySql one. This old application has more than 100 reports (.rpt Crystal Report XI R2, simple reports nothing too fancy) that need to be created from scratch since the data structure is completely changing.

How should I approach this? Continue with CRXI(can't really afford to buy anything new), not knownig if is really compatible with VS2013, or just use the ReportViewer in Visual Studio ? How is the learning curve coming from CRXI? Are there any free service that I can use ?

Answer 1

You might find your question can be answered by reading this Stack Overflow question:
Crystal Reports vs ReportViewer Pros/Cons?

Based on my experience with Crystal Report (1 year) and Report Viewer--RDLC (just learn it recently). I prefer to avoid developing in Crystal Report as possible as I can. Even though I just began learning Report Viewer, I like it more and more as I use it.

• The downside of Crystal Report is the difficulty to create well bordered table, since Crystal Report doesn't have border property, while in RDLC, you can specify the border of table easily.
• If you excel in creating report in Crystal Report, you might find that creating RDLC for Report Viewer is also easy, but you at first might feel confused since you won't get instant preview of your report while editing your report in Visual Studio, but after you getting hang of it, it will be easy.
• Creating, developing, and using RDLC is free. If you develop RDL, you should deploy the report in the server with SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) installed, which you will need to buy license for that.

---

RDLC is Report Definition Language (Client) which use XML and can be opened with Microsoft's Report Viewer.

RDL is Report Definition Language which also use same XML as RDLC and can also be opened with Microsoft's Report Viewer.