Question

I need to generate a report/printout programmatically.

My app currently uses FastReport to build a report, consisting of text, images, tables etc.

It does not bind to any database. Everything is built programmatically.

However, the finished report does not look the same in PDF and RTF, and the old code is generally very complicated.

Are there any better tools to programmatically make a printout or report? Preferably one that outputs PDF and DOC.

Answer 1

In my opinion you’ve already got the best! I’ve used QuickReports, Piparti (early ReportBuilder), Crystal(!) and ReportBuilder and I’ve written a few reports by sending commands direct to the printer. As far as I’m concerned FastReport is much better (although I haven’t tried Rave – nor will I).

Is it a recent version of FR? The PDF output for us is fine.
They have some good examples of writing reports through code on their website I believe and if you’re looking at re-writing all the reports in A.N.Other reporting product why not, instead, use the opportunity to re-write the reports in a more maintainable way using FR? (Assuming that’s possible, of course). Perhaps a cleaner approach to the code of the report generation will make it easier for the FR converter to create the RTF/DOC output…

I’ve never had much luck generating decent RTF versions of reports from commercial report writers. The only decent output I got was through lovingly hand coding every report using hundreds of ‘{‘,’}’ and ‘\’ and spending days reading the RTF specs. Never again!
A lot of it appears to be down to the order you add the text/lines/fonts/styles etc to the report and the RTF generator can find it difficult to get the best rendering – I think.