Question

I have a small web application based on asp.net 2010 that manages invoices.

After the invoice is saved, it should automatically generate a pdf file.

which of the following solutions would be fast and easy to incorporate?

1. Use Sql Server 2008 Reports
2. Use Crystal Reports 2008 and Crystal Reports 2008 for VS 2010
3. Use itextsharp to create the pdf file
4. Use XSLFO to create the pdf file

The point here is I dont know any of the above. Which one is easy and quick to learn and implement. Are there any other solution to achieve this functionality?

Answer 1

I personally prefer iTextSharp as it is very flexible as you build the PDF from code as you need it. However as it is a port of the iText open source java library for PDF it is not 100% intuitive (well from a c# perspective)..

However said there are a lot of help blogs and articles.

I have found:-

1. SQL server 2008 needs a lot of configuration and does not quite give you what you want.
2. You need to purchase Crystal Reports, however said it is quite a good product
3. iTextSharp – Free, fairly easy to set up but not 100% intuitive
4. I have used this and found it tough going although it is possible to get the desired ouput.

edit

For question regarding VS2010, I used it with VS2005 a number of years ago as the basic version came shipped with VS2005. According to the website it appears to integrate into Visual Studio 2010, however this I suspect depends on what version you have.

SAP Crystal Reports can open and edit
files created with SAP Crystal
Reports, version for Visual Studio
2010 (and vice-versa), providing a
fuller set of report design features
compared to SAP Crystal Reports,
version for Visual Studio 2010. SAP
Crystal Reports does not include
tooling to support the Visual Studio
2010 development environment but
developers can use the SAP Crystal
Reports, version for Visual Studio
2010 runtime engine to deploy SAP
Crystal Reports RPT files with all the
extended design features.