Are there another reporting software that can replace Crystal Reports for Windows Forms Applications, that supports Arabic language and is better ?
I have no idea about support for Arabic, but I used DevExpress for reporting and it was excellent. Very good integration with Visual Studio and C#.
It’s not cheap though (not crazy expensive, but not cheap either).
I second DX reporting, except that last time we used it there was some serious hackery we had to do to get it working with Core and SQLCipher
Been using DevExpress reports for 10 years. Their solid.
Amongst my company’s clients in insurance and banking, most people have moved from crystal reports to Microsoft Office and SSRS. Population of excel spreadsheets we use EPPlus, and SSRS reports are populated with the database side of things, using stored procedures for population.
SSRS is so underappreciated and under-supported by Microsoft. It’s truly a very powerful framework that can deliver good reporting. It doesn’t even require the data be in an MSSQLS instance: it’s capable of making data source connections over various other means.
The major issue is that it really hasn’t changed in over a decade so A) the interfaces are very primitive by today’s standards and certainly less compatible with newer application stacks and B) it requires people to have pretty extensive knowledge of the SSDT BI tooling or the RDL format to produce anything more useful than an Excel spreadsheet.
I think Microsoft missed a huge boat here, particularly since SSRS was/is included in pretty much every licensed level of MSSQL Server and the development tools were free and widely available.
There is still a shortage of reasonably priced embeddable BI solutions.
Looker is best, but has a learning curve and is priced way too high. Tableau is middle road. Power BI is a joke. I won’t take a job from anyone who is hiring power bi developers.
Consider generating HTML reports – it will give a lot more flexibility and future proofing.
I can’t speak to supporting Arabic, but I have been using Telerik’s Reporting tools for WinForms applications.
In addition to the already mentioned DevExpress and Telerik, there’s ActiveReports from GrapeCity.
SQL SSRS can generate pdfs etc
We moved from Crystal to Stimulsoft a while back.
i have this fantasy i play out in my mind where i make a crystal reports clone and make billions of dollars because its usable. I also have one about making a installshield clone…use devexpress imo.
wow name I haven’t heard in a while. SSRS or PowerBI.
I use Jasper Reports in my job, but it’s an web application so not sure if it would work for you, I’m just giving you an alternative but I don’t really recommend it, it’s buggy as hell, some other projects in my company use Crystal Reports, I haven’t used it myself but it does seem better than Jasper
Jasper Reports works client side too. It works reasonably well, though one would need to be fairly experienced in Java to construct the appropriate adapter program to be run from C#.
