Birt for reporting

[louise rochford]

Has anyone tried using BIRT from eclipse?

I've used Jasper, but it didn't cope well with big reports. I'm inclined to try Crystal next time, but wondered if BIRT might be the way to go...

[Madhav Lakkapragada]

I haven't used BIRT. My interest lies in Crystal reports. Looks like you have done some home work on Crystal reports. Wordering if you could share some links or pointers on Crystal reports. Didn't mean to hijack your thread.
TIA.

- m
[ June 28, 2005: Message edited by: Madhav Lakkapragada ]

[Prem Khan]

Crystal Reports is a good tool to use to develop reports. Be carfull of crystal enterprize. It is very hard to lauch web based reports off a jsp page if you use enterprize. There is a stand alone crystal reports application server that is not too bad.

Lisencing is so costly for crystal servers i warn you.
But for accually creating reports and designing, it is very intuitive if you have ever used a reporting tool before.

What exacty did you find bad about jasper ?
Slow run time ? Hard to develop ?

[louise rochford]

We already have various licences for Crystal - mostly from developing reports for use in VB apps. We also have an enterprise licence - what exactly is the problem with running reports with Crystal Enterprise?

Jasper was OK to develop in - there seemed to be a few bugs which came to light when saving the reports, but providing we followed a certain routine it worked ok.

The real problem was that we were trying to create a big report containing a subreport (several tens of thousands of rows). We needed both html & pdf output. There was a bug fix to allow you to stream to pdf for large reports, but even with this it was slow - approx 4 hrs to run. Creating an html report on the full dataset crashed the machine. We tested the db fetch side of things & that was returning in a few minutes - huge amounts of time were being consumed in the fromatting of the data.
I don't have the time (or maybe the skills) to fix Jasper myself, so I thought it was probably time to turn to a commercial alternative...hence crystal.
BIRT looks like it should work well, but its at the early stages yet so probably doesn't have everything I need (e.g. subreporting capabilities)