I need to generate a multi-page report document ultimately in pdf format which consists mainly of charts and tables and some text from data stored in a database. Currently we do this using by pulling the data into an excel template using VBA code from which a pdf document is generated. This far from ideal but it has the advantage the format can be tweaked by hand if needed. I am looking for an approach which can generate a document more directly. One possibility would be to generate HTML first and covert that into pdf, which has the advantage that the html is version is also available. However it’s done I’d need to have fairly fine control over the look & feel to get as close to the existing format as possible,
and I’d want tools to generate the charts & tables rather than building these up from scratch.
The final document consists of several pages so as well as being able to control the look of the component charts & tables, I’d want to have control of the overall document layout i.e. things like where the page breaks are, scaling of the components charts & graphs, inserting headings, text paragraphs, footnotes etc.
I prefer a .net based solution but would also consider java and am open to both open source and commercial packages. I noticed that companies like DevExpress, SyncFusion and Telerik have charting libraries so would be interested in other’s experience with these.
In the end I decided to build the reports up in WPF and use to WPFs printing features to go to PDF either by using a PDF print driver of going to XPS then PDF. In the end this is really an issue about how to generated a printable document with fine control over the formatting. This can be done in WPF by building up pages on FixedDocuemnt objects. The elements will be thing like TextBlocks and 3rd party chart components. The tables could also be 3rd party components, but would be easy eneough to code up from scratch as WPF custom controls.