Customer Reviews
Average Review: 
based on 10 reviews.
Gerald Koko...[Germany] 16-Aug-2005Review:
Hello, after having read g.patterson [United Kingdom] 13-May-2004 Article I thought give Devexpress a chance. I'm using AR for 2 years now. And I'm not 100% satisfied with it. So I check other programs regularly.
I also tried Component One and Crystal Reports. None of them is really good (Licence, usability…)
After my quick evaluation of Devexpess Reporting I can say: DevEx is good for a quick data orientated report. But try to merge horizontal and landscape reports into one, try to overlay report pages. Try to export the textbox to pdf or html and compare what you see with what you expected…. 90 Points for the editor, 30 p for flexibility, support : don’t know. Overall: 60 p
In my opinion AR still remains the best reporting tool for Dot net. It is maybe not as easy to start with, but it is much more flexible and customisable in the end. You can do any size and mixed type reports - the only limit is your RAM. The new version also has a quite good looking charting component included and report class inheritance. 60 p for the editor, 90 for Flexibility, support: 60 p (easy questions 90 p, more difficult questions 30 p) . So in the end I give 70 to 75 Point to AR.net
Cheers Gerald
Try more…
ahmedomar [Egypt] 28-Oct-2004Review:
We were using another product for reporting our huge amounts of data. We found this good product which solved at least two of our problems: Client printing and Arabic digits printing. When using the trail version, our customer recommend us to change from the old tool to this good one. I hope to use it widly in our Arabic sites, specially when Arabic numbers are printed in correct shapes.
Thanks to the support team, and the follow up steps, and regards to all the team behind this product.
AZKA National Information Technology,
Egypt branch
Michael Mason - DD 08-Jun-2004Review:
In response to G. Patterson I would like to extend my apologies on your support experence with ActiveReports for .NET. As a member of the technical support staff I know that we try to provide as much help as possible to get the results you are looking for. Our staff try their best to respond within one business day to any support requests we recieve through e-mail or through our online message board system.
Regarding the specific problem, I don't know the specifics of how the image data was saved in your database however you should be able to bind our picture control to binary image data in the database (as long as the data is a valid, .NET memorystream type when read back from the database). The control however cannot be bound to a field that simply stores a path to the image on a physical drive somewhere. In that case you would need some code to handle this in your Fetch Data event for the report - the support tech should have helped you in this regard.
Again, I am sorry for the experience you had, and I hope if you consider ActiveReports for .NET in the future you do not have the same experence.
g.patterson [United Kingdom] 13-May-2004Review:
Although ActiveReports integrates into the .NET environment, I found it extremely fiddly to set up. The process of adding a report to your project and getting it to work for the first time is a lengthy process.
What I found most dissapointing about ActiveReports is that it only seems to be good at handling textual data. When you add a field to a report it adds it as a text field, rather than looking at the actual type in the database. For example, I needed to write a report to output images from a database - something which is very easy with Crystal Reports. After emailing DataDynamics support, it became apparent that this cannot be done without writing lots of code to read the images from the database and then assign them to picture controls on the report. I wasn't sure exactly how to do this so I asked support for an example, but they told me that they did not have a sample program so would not be able to provide me with an example. They did provide me with a report to display a single image read from a file, but this was very different to my requirement.
In the end I bought XtraReports for .NET from DevExpress, which is much easier to use and also much cheaper. I was also able to write the report I needed very easilly, and found DevExpress support much more helpful. I would therefore reccommend looking at XtraReports.
Michael Mason - DD 31-Mar-2004Review:
As one of the developer support techs for ActiveReports 2.0 and ActiveReports for .NET I'd like to answer some of the incorrect information in some of the reviews I have seen here - The Rich Text Box control supports RTF in the 1.0 or wordpad spec (and will handle word wrap functionality). There is also a function to help keep the control on one page called KeepTogether - which is included with most of the controls we have to put on the report surface.
Regarding the Excel export - the basic excel export does it's best to mimic the data from the report, however if you need more control you can use the SpreadBuilder option that will allow you to build your own excel document.
Regarding the pricing - The major difference between us and other reporting component vendors is our pricing model, which is developer based. (Meaning, if you are an independent developer you only need to buy one license, then you can use the product for any of your customers that you produce reports for). The only time there would be an additional cost that I can think of would be if your client gets access to the source code once the project is complete and you don't maintain it. In that case, your customer would have to buy a license for their own development purposes. However the alternative is per-client licensing, which can become very costly very quickly in all but the smallest reporting environments.
Any more questions can be directed to http://www.datadynamics.com/forums as I am one of the moderators out there, I'll do my best to answer!
l.a.marco [USA] 25-Feb-2004Review:
It has potential, but the tool is not there yet:
Missing features, comments on ActiveReports for .NET:
- The RichText component does not have a WordWrap option
- The RichText component does not have an option to keep the field together on the same page
- Export to excel is very awkward, too many columns are genererated / and/or the cell merging is wrong. Syncfusion does a much better job here.
- The GUI reporter does not show how a datasource can be bound to the report (it's manual coding)
Bob Hoffman, Commercial Software Inc. 28-Aug-2003Review:
The product has excellent features and basically makes laying out a report as easy as developing a Windows form. It also has the "flexibility" to customize as much as necessary and we have pushed it. An important example of this is the ability to bypass its direct SQL handling and feed it a Datatable constructed programmatically.
We are developing Web based reports using the PDF option at the rate of 1 or 2 reports per man day. The learning curve is a few days until full productivity, presuming that you are already an experienced ASP.NET programmer.
There are a number of flukes and idiosyncracies such as the fact that the sample web program has to be run on the web server as the last part of the installation (undocumented). Moving source files from one project to another is also tricky due to the need for the .rpm file to be synchoronized with the .vb file. You have no choice but to cut and paste text.
The saving grace is the support, which is the best we have ever experienced. The support technicians answer quickly and know the product thoroughly. It has never taken more than a few minutes to solve a problem and move on.
It is pricey, but well worth it if you have serious development requirements. Assume that you will need the professional version (about $1200 per developer) for ASP.NET to get the report display capabilities.
art.nlo [Russia] 15-Jun-2003Review:
cool man
alan [USA] 22-Mar-2003Review:
It's a great product and easy to use, but unfortunately the price is forcing me to find an alternative. I've used it since before ActiveReport 1.0 was released, but as an independent software developer, I cannot justify the price unless one of my big clients foots the bill. $1200 for a single user license!!! I can get MSDN Universal for less than that! (I know it's not a replacement; it's just used for comparison).
eandb [Hungary] 20-Sep-2002Review:
This is a super product, with a great idea behind it. Your report is like a form, you have events (like in a form). Developing a report is like developing a form with the native language of your application. No need to learn a new report language. It´s a piece of cake, like Active Report 1 & 2 also. Thank you!
