Hi,
I'm about ready to switch from Crystal Reports to Telerik Reporting. I know some features are not supported but my change is more aimed at simplified operations and distribution and Telerik Reporting greatly appeals me.
It does appeal me, but man, i have to say, some things are just not right... Let me explain how i see the designer after working with it for 2 days now.
First, data integration is not easy. I have a bunch of DataSets already built but i was never able to run the report by simply assigning the dataset to the report. I even looked at the training videos and although it works in the videos, it never worked for me. Why? I could never figure out. Thats not the worst problem, i could easily add programmatic code to the report and test it that way and it works fine.
The worst problem is the sluggish designer and it's features...
1) My god, you guys need to drastically improve it. I have been designing 1 report in 2 days while with crystal reports, i could design a super complex report with tons of fields in a matter of hours. I'm afraid my machine will crash and burn and it's not a hardware problem, i'm running a practically brand new 4 gig o ram / Core 2 Duo 2.4 Ghz machine with Windows XP. Having 30 fields on the form and a few lines makes the designer slow down dramatically to the point that dragging fields stop working and i have to click and reclick several times to be able to drag...
2) Integration of shapes is atrocious... If youve used CR before, you know how the canvas concept work, drag a line from one section to the other and it still works. With Telerik's report designer (although i understand why, it's a programmatic issue), i cannot span a control in two sections, thus creating grid like layout becomes a PAIN.
Maybe the inclusion of a few controls to help drawing gridlike reports such as invoices could help a lot... Also, a few tutorials on the aspect of placement of the different controls could help. I've had a lot of problems to place my controls and align grid lines together without causing gaps or overlapping elements. In fact, my invoice now features overlapping elements since i have no choice at all or the invoice cannot be migrated from CR to TR.
3) Missing features
3.1) Capability to strech a section to fill the rest of the page. (only for windows output, web can't support this yet because CSS is not respected correctly) For example, in my invoice, i'd like to strech a group footer section to fill the rest of the page. It would look much nicer to my client than having the invoice stop at the middle of the page if i have only 2 lines in their invoice...
3.2) Many group headers... In CR, i can have several detail/group section (headers and footers). It would be great to be able to have access to several of these. Now you probably wonder why, it's because of 3.1. In a document you may wish to allow one section to span from top to bottom to fill gaps but you may want some items to stick at the bottom of the gap filling and this gap filling could be applied to the first group footer and the second group footer could contain the page tail for the group.
3.3) Support for PageNumber and PageTotal anywhere in the document not just headers and footers.
For the rest, great work, i love telerik controls and it will not prevent me from switching to telerik at all. We just decided to abandon Infragistics and Crystal Report due to their poor service and i hope we will get great service from Telerik.
Thanks
I'm about ready to switch from Crystal Reports to Telerik Reporting. I know some features are not supported but my change is more aimed at simplified operations and distribution and Telerik Reporting greatly appeals me.
It does appeal me, but man, i have to say, some things are just not right... Let me explain how i see the designer after working with it for 2 days now.
First, data integration is not easy. I have a bunch of DataSets already built but i was never able to run the report by simply assigning the dataset to the report. I even looked at the training videos and although it works in the videos, it never worked for me. Why? I could never figure out. Thats not the worst problem, i could easily add programmatic code to the report and test it that way and it works fine.
The worst problem is the sluggish designer and it's features...
1) My god, you guys need to drastically improve it. I have been designing 1 report in 2 days while with crystal reports, i could design a super complex report with tons of fields in a matter of hours. I'm afraid my machine will crash and burn and it's not a hardware problem, i'm running a practically brand new 4 gig o ram / Core 2 Duo 2.4 Ghz machine with Windows XP. Having 30 fields on the form and a few lines makes the designer slow down dramatically to the point that dragging fields stop working and i have to click and reclick several times to be able to drag...
2) Integration of shapes is atrocious... If youve used CR before, you know how the canvas concept work, drag a line from one section to the other and it still works. With Telerik's report designer (although i understand why, it's a programmatic issue), i cannot span a control in two sections, thus creating grid like layout becomes a PAIN.
Maybe the inclusion of a few controls to help drawing gridlike reports such as invoices could help a lot... Also, a few tutorials on the aspect of placement of the different controls could help. I've had a lot of problems to place my controls and align grid lines together without causing gaps or overlapping elements. In fact, my invoice now features overlapping elements since i have no choice at all or the invoice cannot be migrated from CR to TR.
3) Missing features
3.1) Capability to strech a section to fill the rest of the page. (only for windows output, web can't support this yet because CSS is not respected correctly) For example, in my invoice, i'd like to strech a group footer section to fill the rest of the page. It would look much nicer to my client than having the invoice stop at the middle of the page if i have only 2 lines in their invoice...
3.2) Many group headers... In CR, i can have several detail/group section (headers and footers). It would be great to be able to have access to several of these. Now you probably wonder why, it's because of 3.1. In a document you may wish to allow one section to span from top to bottom to fill gaps but you may want some items to stick at the bottom of the gap filling and this gap filling could be applied to the first group footer and the second group footer could contain the page tail for the group.
3.3) Support for PageNumber and PageTotal anywhere in the document not just headers and footers.
For the rest, great work, i love telerik controls and it will not prevent me from switching to telerik at all. We just decided to abandon Infragistics and Crystal Report due to their poor service and i hope we will get great service from Telerik.
Thanks