One of the most popular posts I had last year as far as hits and feedback involved my comparison of Active Reports to SQL Reporting services where I concluded that even though Reporting Services was free, there were some factors and situations which made Active Reports a much better choice for a development team that wasn't highly constrained by budget.
After posting that review, I received several emails from developers who told me I should check out a product called Xtra Reports from Developer Express. I've been meaning to do just that for a while now and finally had the chance this weekend. Here's a summary of what I found.
Price
The price for the Xtra Reports suite is very competitive, coming in at around1/3 of what the Active Reports package comes in. They have the same royalty free distribution license and also for $100 more you can snag the source code.
Installation
The installation ran flawlessly. I didn't have to do any configuration beyond adding the web controls to my toolbox by referencing the dll. It was clean and easy.
Report Designer
The report designer is on par with other designers out there. Once you've used one you've used them all for the most part. I had little difficulty building the same report (Asset valuation by category type) that I built for SQL Reporting Services and Active Reports.
Server Configuration
Active Reports did require me to reference some assemblies in my web.config file. Xtra Reports did not. I set copy local = true on their dlls and I was able to xcopy deploy my web project to the server and it all worked fine with no additional fine tuning. Simple is good.
Dynamic Connection String
One of the challenges I had with SQL Reporting Services was that I couldn't find a clean and easy way to change the database connection string based on the logged in user. Being that my hosted product, Easy Assets .NET grants each licensed company its own database I need a reporting solution that can connect to the proper database for the current user. Active Reports was able to accomplish this through some runtime code, but as far as simplicity and lines of code the Developer Express product won out on this challenge.
Conclusion
I haven't had the opportunity to go very deep with the component, but initial impressions are critical to me as a developer since I generally do not have the time or patience to deal with complex installs or deployment scenarios. Both Active Reports and Xtra Reports are easy to install and configure, the only difference being the web.config settings for Active Reports which weren't really hard to figure out, it was just nicer to copy and forget with Xtra Reports.
I honestly haven't had a chance to play with their toolbar yet which claims to be able to export report data to a variety of file types (pdf, xls, etc). I poked at it a bit on the sample application on their website but for some reason it was trying to download a .aspx page instead of the file type I was expecting.
If anyone at devexpress finds my blog, you should probably take a look at that.
Keep in mind that this review only scratches the surface of what the Developer Express product is capable of. Active Reports is a solid product and still my favorite choice, but I can conclude that developers on a budget would be well served by Developer Express's product.