FastReport.Net

FastReport.net is a reporting solution for Windows Forms and ASP.NET which provides all the tools necessary for developing reports, including a visual report designer, a reporting core, previewer, dialog designer and macro interpreter. It helps to create independent application reports and also is used in standalone reporting—in other words it enables us to generate reports quickly and efficiently. FastReport.net has built in scripts that help manage interaction between a dialogue form’s controls, perform complex data handling and can be connected to any database to create tables and queries from it. Plus, it has the ability to have the results printed out in any document formats.

Features of FastReport.net and how useful it is for creating or generating reports:

User Manual - FastReport.net provides a useful user manual that helps users understand and serves as a guide on how to use the technology. The user manual provides information about fundamentals that tackle the principles of working with a report in the FastReport.net. Report creation handles the methods of creating common types of reports, while the Data section covers the types of data that can be generated by the technology. Further, there are sections on the expressions used, dialogue forms where you can enter any type of information needed for creating a report, and how reports can be displayed, printed or exported into one of the supported formats. 

Programmers Manual - Aside from the User Manual, FastReport.net also provides a manual for programmers that gives general information and a wide range of useful ideas, methods and insights that are very helpful on how to work with the technology in different environments and in different ways. This manual contains conceptual information for modeling reports and step by step tutorials for building a variety of reports. 

Trial Version - FastReport.net provides a trial application with the demo version that allows us to evaluate its capabilities. The trial version allows access to all the documentation, SDK and forum.

Work in different technology - One of the advantages of FastReport.net is that you have the option to use it in different environments and with various technologies and services like Visual Studio, Asp.net, and WCF service.

Reasonable Price – With a very reasonable price, you can get all the features that FastReport.net offers from reporting solution with royalty report engine and designer components.

Converts Crystal Report Template – FastReport.net supports Crystal Reports template to FastReport.Net template conversion from Report Bands and Report Objects that makes it more advantageous than any other report generating technologies. We can see the comparison of Crystal Report and FastReport.Net on FastReport's website that displays supported objects between the two technologies. In the said list, we can see how:

Cloud Technology Support – FastReport.Net has the ability to integrate with different services such as DropBox, SkyDrive and Google Drive.

Report Designer – this is the key component of FastReport.NET. The designer has classic views like data tree, report component tree, a report workspace, and a panel with selected components properties. Report Designer supports useful features such as   undo/redo, zoom-in and zoom-out, guidelines and rulers and has a fully customizable interface with a MS Visual Studio look. Lastly, it can be integrated into the run-time, meaning you can give your users the ability to modify existing reports and create new ones whenever you want. The integrated report designer is run-time royalty-free. With these features, you can easily visualize the logical structure of your report and they also help you understand the report especially when you are not the one who made it.

Additional Information about the report designer

• Standard and Label report wizards
• Drag and drop tools for quickly creating reports.
• Can be used in MDI or Multi Document Interface mode that allows working with several reports at the same time.
• Works on any professional edition platforms.

Documentation – FastReport.net provides very helpful documentation that really tackles the key components and information on how the technology works. The documentation consists of PDF files just like the User Manual and Programmers Manual and video tutorials that make learning very easy and understandable.

Support – There is a wide range of support as mentioned above. FastReport also has Social Media support like Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, Twitter, Forum etc., where you can hear great ideas from people who have experience using the product. It also has a simple guide on how to uninstall whenever you need to remove it or reinstall and lastly, FastReport.net has support from different big companies around the globe. You can see the list of companies categorized by continents on their website. With this information, we can be assured that this is established technology and can expect new things to come and additional services in the future. 

Report templates save reports as .rtm files or to a database a BLOB field that gives us the opportunity to store the report layout definition outside of the .exe and load the reports as needed.

FastReport.Net architecture allows you to create your own objects, wizards and DB engines, and export filters. That means if a built-in feature doesn’t fit your needs you can have it extended to meet your requirements.

FastReport.Net allows placing on the bands objects on different file types such as Text, Picture, Formatted text, Bar code, Line, Flag, Table, Matrix, Nested reports, Diagram and also the creation of control elements on your own.

Conclusion

FastReport.Net’s main purpose is to improve and help us generate reports in an easy manner while making our generated reports look better than reports from traditional report generation technology—all while providing great functionality that is comfortable, compact and fast. With this, we can present our report in a clean and more understandable way that can be beneficial to the author (which by all means can take credit for better presentations) and also to the business which can present information in an organized manner. With massive support from different companies around the globe, we can expect more features in the future along with even easier ways to generate reports.