c# - Reporting (free || open source) Alternatives to Crystal Reports in Winforms

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Answer 1

You could always roll your own. I'm getting rid of Crystal Reports in our project because currently, we can't update our old reports without upgrading everyone to XP, because we develop in VS 2008, and the new CR doesn't support Win2K. Also, CR takes about 30 seconds to build and load the report, mine is instantaneous.

I wrote my own XML serializer, and I build custom objects that are populated from List<T>s, DataTables, etc..., serialize the object, load it into an XmlDocument, append an XSLT stylesheet, and write it to a directory containing that XSLT file and any CSS and images. The XSLT file then transforms it to HTML/CSS when the XML file is opened in the user's browser.

I could also probably load it into a WebBrowser control and use one of the free PDF libraries to convert it to PDF and print it. See these threads for more details:

• Render PDF in iTextSharp from HTML with CSS
• Maintain CSS styling when converting HTML to PDF in ASP.NET