Crystal reports or Eclipse BIRT?

We use BIRT as part of our product and we're very happy with both BIRT itself and the support provided by the community.

We use BIRT as part of our product and we're very happy with both BIRT itself and the support provided by the community. We provide pre-canned reports (200 and growing) and allow the customer to make their own as well. Eclipse/BIRT makes this relatively easy although generating a mass of reports is a pain in the GUI (not just BIRT, any GUI) so we have a batch process to take a relatively simple configuration file describing the reports, and generating the rptdesign files.

One piece of advice, if you're creating reports thousands of pages long, you're probably not doing it right :-) We try to keep our reports relatively simple so as to minimize the data traveling "across the wire" and to better target the audience. I can't imaging who, in their right mind, would want to read a thousand page report.

If you ever need to generate a report that complies with a MIL-STD. (7016F in my case) 1 page per item, 10000+ items. And some other pages.

Wonder why I recommend a 64bit server? – Tim Williscroft Jul 9 '09 at 4:19 BIRT supports large data sets and large reports (from 2.0) so you should be able to generate such large ones: eclipse. Org/birt/phoenix/project/notable2.0.

Php#jump_11 – Csaba_H Jul 9 '09 at 5:44.

You don't need a Business Inteligence or Reporting Tool. You need to develop a program that write directly into the printer to produce listings. Are you printing the bible?

The requirements for one project I've seen ran 10K pages. And yes, it gets read. I guess some developer worlds don't intersect.

– Tim Williscroft Nov 11 '09 at 23:54.

I have no experience of BIRT, Crystal Reports for eclipse is free (as in beer) too and is certainly capable of producing very big reports.

We have now found that getting really technical formatting is fairly tiresome ( indented columns with decimal point alignment, that kidney of thing. – Tim Williscroft Nov 12 '09 at 0:23.

BIRT is relatively simple to use for simple things, but for complex things it is a bit confusing. The documentation is very poor in certain areas, in particular the API doc is not updated frequently. Do you need to do anything that is not exactly like the standard BIRT examples, aside from page size?

Check what you need to do, as Horcrux7 said -- if you'll need to write a custom extension for a data source/output format, process TIFF images or deal with multiple "datasets" in one report item, you just might lose a few years off of your life-span and grow more bald solving the problem. :-) BIRT is heavily dependent on Eclipse, and thus quite flaky. However, my experience with Crystal Reports has been somewhat worse, so I give it some slack.

Just note that BIRT is not open source in the usual way -- one company is responsible for nearly all there is to it, and there is very little real "development community" to lean on, just any internal people whose supervisor might deign to allow him to throw you a bone. The poor documentation of the source code and occasional bizarre OOP hierarchies leave the beginning obfuscated code contestant speechless. :-).

One thing to beware of -- BIRT does not support common TIFF images. You may run into trouble with that -- they'll need to be converted to PNG or JPG or something else, unless you have one particular TIFF spec format. – sventech Aug 11 '09 at 15:52 BIRT ain't that difficult, speaking of years of developpment when in a (quite uqseless) answer to a question I posted you confess that you have a "three weeks experience" plus it is in a very particular range of the birt use (so it seems).

Telling that BIRT is not open source in a normal way is like saying that openGL is not really open source ... Yes BIRT goes along with another solution (Actuate10) but BIRT is open source ... Computer are complicated you know buddy if you wanna do some sophisticated stuff you'll need much work and patience (be warned) – Ar3s Aug 12 '09 at 9:09 I'm sorry that you're offended at me. I have more than 3 weeks experience... I said it took me 3 weeks to find the information I was looking for about extending BIRT. I have worked with many other open source products and almost always found more people sharing answers in public fora and participating in development.

However, I was speaking out of frustration, and my comment was overly harsh/sarcastic -- the ":-)" emoticon is meant to indicate that I'm jesting. – sventech Aug 12 '09 at 14:13 I don't feel offended, I just have serious patience issue (that I really should fix) with people acting or talking like they know all when it is clearly not true, I mean you came on my question telling "First there is no interactivity in birt" which sounds pretty much like "listen to daddy kiddo" to me. The fact is that I finally made interactives charts (quite long after posting) which proves you talk like you know all while not knowing at all.It is certainly your good will that speaks too fast but it is an attitude that kills learning.

– Ar3s Aug 13 '09 at 7:45.

A team in my organization uses the free version of Crystal Reports (JRC), I used their savoir-faire also for a little in-house tool. From the experience I gathered with JRC, these are the pros and cons: Pro: They managed to deploy fairly complex reports with huge volumes of data Con: There are some limitations in the free version, it seems there is a maximum of three concurrent reports of a kind at the same time in the application. Con: The connection and the sql are hardcoded in the report, so it's pain in the ass to migrate the reports.

Con: IMHO the api for the free version is shitty, the connection part is hard to customize (like doing JNDI and stuff). The support is very scarce. Con: There were some issues, like the report not showing for no reason.

With an automatic update of the java 6 on the server, the reports stopped workin, but I don't know if this was the fault of java or of JRC. I had to freeze to an older version of java 6 in order to make the reports to behave.

Crystal Reports Java SDK is not fully functional. If you create a Report using the Crystal Reports Designer its hit and miss as to whether the output will be the same. The Java version is a complete from scratch re-implementation of the original version.

Some functionality such as the Azalea barcode libraries that work with the standard Crystal Reports don't work with the Java version, and its not entirely clear from their support forums whether it will ever be. I'm not sure that this holds true for the Java version, but the normal version relies on the default printer driver to format your page - this was as of CR 2008 But I think the worst thing about Crystal Reports is that the . Rpt file is in a proprietary format, so it is almost impossible to move from it once you have any number or reports written in it.

Birt reports is free and you can definitely get around most limitations with some inserted java scripts. So there is no reason to use crystal reports. Crystal reports IDE is user friendly, that's all.

I cant really gove you an answer,but what I can give you is a way to a solution, that is you have to find the anglde that you relate to or peaks your interest. A good paper is one that people get drawn into because it reaches them ln some way.As for me WW11 to me, I think of the holocaust and the effect it had on the survivors, their families and those who stood by and did nothing until it was too late.