Reports are a mere after thought on many projects. A great
deal of effort is put into creating forms to manipulate the customer’s data,
but many developers and project managers wait until the last minute to create
reports. At this point in many projects, the budget is nearly gone, and project
stakeholders are looking for something that may not be delivererable within the
current budget constraints. When the time comes, that a customer asks for a
great deal of data to be formatted in a specific way, with multiple search
criteria selected, developers are often times left scrambling to develop a
solution to fit within their budget.
Depending upon the complexity of the data to be rendered,
some developers decide to present the data to their users using the same
technologies that their application was create created with (ASP, Win Forms,
WPF, etc.) instead of a reporting package such as Crystal Reports. Many believe
because that budget constraints mean that they do not have time to learn a new
tool or purchase reporting tools. In simple situations, this option may be
viable, but when your reports start to become more complex, using libraries
that are created specifically for report writing will make life much easier.
This is where Crystal Reports comes in.