Reporting framework can be customized by end user

Question

I am having a hard time to select a suitable framework/tool for a reporting purpose. I have a Silverlight application where I need to integrate reporting functionality. Challenging part is, I need to allow end-user to design the Report. End user is some one who doesn't have SQL or any other technical knowledge.

I should able to allow him to select few templates, do drag an drop for required fields and create the report. At this moment I am already using DevExpress reports in the application which are stored in Server side and display in ASP.Net page within the HtmlWindow. I did some some research and found following tools with few bottlenecks

1. DevExpress have a feature call XtraReports which is discontinued for Silverlight and have limited functionalities thus i cannot select it.

2. I found most of people use jasper reports but i am not sure whether it has an End user report designer and whether we can use it within the .Net Application.

Are their any tools/frameworks available which are suitable to solve this kind of problem?

Answer 1

Syncfusion Essential Report Viewer for Silverlight can be used for displaying RDL based reports in Silverlight. RDL is an open Xml Schema for reports, so you can move your reports to other platforms if you decide to move from Silverlight in the future (Syncfusion provides viewers for JavaScript, ASP.NET, ASP.NET MVC, WPF, UWP).

Regarding the report designing interface, you can expose a custom interface for dragging and dropping fields (the drag and drop manager could be useful)and generate the required RDL through the ReportDefinition API.

Adding information for editing by end user

We have prepared sample to dynamically generate a report using report definition by drag dropping element in canvas. The following sample changes are done to achieve dynamic report creation.

1. A ListView is used to show the data column items that supports dragging elements from the list.
2. The table columns can be positioned in design page as like XAML designer by drag and dropping the list view elements.
3. Based on the items in the design page, we have dynamically generated the report in code behind by modifying the report definition.
4. A button is used to view the generated report in Report Viewer.

You can able to download the sample here

In the above sample we have demonstrated the creation of textboxes with data columns. If the above sample does not meet the requirement then please share more details on the requirement.

The whole product is available for free through the community license if you qualify (less than 1 million USD in revenue).

I work for Syncfusion.