I am developing a business portal for a company, where users must register before they can login. At the end of the registration the user must have the option to download a document that is pretty much a contract to sign. This document has to be available AFTER the user has completed registration.
The document must as well be available to download at any given time.
My question is how do I do this??
I looked into crystal reports and pdf creation. But since I’ve never done anything like this (on a web plataform), I’m not sure what’s the best approach. I have questions like:
- Is it better to build a report and convert it to pdf, or create a pdf directly?
- Should I pull all the data I need from the server and build the pdf/report on the server side (and then download the pdf) or build it on the client side?
- Is there a better way than reports?
Also in the future the application will have other kinds of reports that the user can view or download. And because I have to keep that in mind, I don’t know if I should create a different project to host the reporting engine, or just integrate the reports wherever they are needed (I’m going with the 3 layered arquitecture scheme -> UI, BLL, DAL)
These are (so far) my pressing concerns on the matter. I’ve spent a few hours reading some forums and blogs about the subject, but couldn’t make up my mind. Any help on the subject is more than welcome.
Thanks 🙂
I would definitely advocate Crystal Reports if you expect further reporting requirements later on. What sort of reports do you envisage? Customer facing (invoices, confirmations etc) or more tabular/financial/statistical? If the latter I would start to lean toward SSRS.
And definitely create your report on the server side.