5

We need some simple ad-hoc reporting solution for our ASP.NET web-site.

Just an ability to build a query with user friendly interface, then show the result of this query in some table and maybe export it to Excel or print.

The solution must be quite easy for end users (our site visitors) who know nothing about databases, SQL and other tech stuff.

6 Answers6

6

EasyQuery.NET may suit your needs. It is proprietary but they have free version as well.

4

Though not .NET (yet) - but embeddable using an iframe - I'd recommend i-net Clear Reports (used to be i-net Crystal-Clear) sporting an ad-hoc reporting component that is made to be an easy-to-use thing for non-technical users. Your users won't have to know anything about reporting at all. They simply select the kind of report, the data et voila there is a report suiting the needs.

Besides the web embeddability of the HTML output you could offer a standalone component and/or Java applet (i-net Clear Reports is entirely Java, but we're working hard to port the server side over to .NET). The upcoming version even supports web-skins so your users / customers won't recognise it's "third party". ;)

Disclosure: Yep. I work for the company who built this.

Epaga
  • 38,231
  • 58
  • 157
  • 245
gamma
  • 1,902
  • 1
  • 20
  • 40
2

I would highly recommend Izenda Reports at http://www.izenda.com. It's a fully integration ready ASP.Net AJAX solution to connect to to your database that allows end-users to build their own reports as well as running of existing reports.

Daniel Bardi
  • 352
  • 4
  • 7
  • I've been using Izenda for awhile and it seems to meet your needs. def. worth downloading their trial over. – cazlab Feb 15 '11 at 19:09
0

Probably not on the "simple" side, but for more sophisticated ad-hoc reporting that allows business users to build a report in the browser without knowing SQL and without installing anything, check out our ActiveReports Server product.

We built it entirely in managed .NET code and we include ASP.NET controls to make it easy to integrate into your own ASP.NET sites. Of course there are webservices for other languages/platforms, and it takes care of many other important details for web-based reporting like scalability/load balancing, scheduling reports, output to excel/pdf/word, etc., role-based security, multi-tenant deployment support, mobile device support, and it is compatible with ActiveReports Developer Component XML report files.

And yes, I'm the Product Manager.

Scott Willeke
  • 8,884
  • 1
  • 40
  • 52
0

To be honest, you probably need to gather requirements and find out what kinds of reports they will be interested in running and build the reports for them. However, have you considered Crystal Reports?

BobbyShaftoe
  • 28,337
  • 7
  • 52
  • 74
  • 1
    BobbyShaftoe, you see, we don't need any formating or something - the regular table is acceptable as a result. But we need to give end users a possibility to build virtually any query to the database, but using some simple user-friendly interface. User should not use SQL etc. –  Apr 10 '09 at 12:39
0

I built something like that for SQL reporting services. It required several tables to pull it off though.

  1. AdHock_SQL_Reports, which included the name, path, and display name for the report.
  2. AdHock_Sql_Reports_Parameters, which included the parameter name, and value, along with a flag that tells the code, the the value could be a SQL commnd to generate values on the fly.

Then you would need to build code to deal with these tables, and to generate a list of drop down lists on a web page.

What I built is pretty "fist pass" and is kind of rough around the edges.

You can also expose SQL reporting services reports to users, and have reporting services provide input fields for those reports. We have started to lean that way and away from my code. ( Its better than what I have anyway )

Russ
  • 12,312
  • 20
  • 59
  • 78