Forum Discussion
Using .NET Reporting Tools (from DevExpress) in Access
I read on another forum someone was looking to replace their Crystal Reports (called from Access) and was asking for suggestions and a number of people suggested DevExpress .NET Reporting Tools. I contacted DevExpress and asked them if they provide a COM wrapper for their tools to make it easier to call from Access. They replied NO because they don't like Unmanaged Code, but they said several of their customers have made Office plug-ins from their tools...
Has anyone here used the DevExpress .NET Reporting Tools with Access ?
If so can you provide some feedback or advice?
Thanks
David R.
- What are you hoping to get out of DevExpress that you can't get out of Access reports?
If you are a .NET programmer or know someone who is, you could create such COM wrapper yourself. This turns an assembly into an ActiveX COM object which you can set a reference to from Access, and call its public interface.Fun fact about DevEx and Access reports: take a look at this presentation, where at 31 min in, we are comparing two reports.
- Tom,
Thank you for the reply. Initially all our reports were all developed in MS-Access. But because the Access report writer didn't have drill-down capabilities we started implementing Crystal Reports 8.5 and calling them from Access using the Crystal Runtime. However we did not upgrade to later versions of Crystal Reports for a number of reasons, and then started shifting to SSRS. Sadly SSRS seems to be stagnant now as Microsoft is putting all their efforts now into Power BI because they get more revenue from it. We also develop some web applications as add-ons to our Access applications. We are looking for one tool that we can use in both Access and Web Applications and replace all three report writers (Access, Crystal, and SSRS) with one solution that we can distribute royalty-free with our software.
Thank you for the link to your presentation. I am really interested in looking at the Northwind 2.0 application.
David
