Alternative to Lazarus Report

[mannewolff]

The Lazarus Reports are quit easy, but buggy. Is there any alternative? I use csv tables and TsdfDataSet with LazReports and thats fine. But the functionality is very poor and buggy.

So if somebody has an alternative which can go with TsdfDataSet as well (not only sql access) please provide.
 

[jujibo]

Buggy? You can fill a bug report so those bugs you are speaking about can be fixed.

http://bugs.freepascal.org/view_all_bug_page.php?project_id=1

Have you tried lr_codereport (addon for lazreport). You can do reports in code and you aren't limited to bands and such things.

For Lazarus you also have Fortes4Lazarus: http://fortes4lazarus.sourceforge.net/

[JuhaManninen]

FastReport has also been ported to Lazarus. Zeljan demonstrated it in Lazaus day in Utrecht.
I don't know if it is officially published yet.

[jujibo]

FastReport has also been ported to Lazarus. Zeljan demonstrated it in Lazaus day in Utrecht.
I don't know if it is officially published yet.

Lazreport is the port of FastReport to Lazarus

FastReport v2.3

May be you are talking about another FastReport version?

[JanRoza]

If you're that dissatisfied with LazReport, you can always try FortesReport which can do what LazReport can do and more. I love it.
Or wait for the Lazarus port of FastReport, but that will not be free I suspect.

 
Jan

[JuhaManninen]

Lazreport is the port of FastReport to Lazarus
FastReport v2.3
May be you are talking about another FastReport version?

No, both LazReport and FastReport are based on FreeReport.
FastReport is a commercial component, LazReport is free.
FastReport is already at version 4.

http://wiki.freepascal.org/LazReport_Documentation
http://www.fast-report.com/en/products/report-generator-for-delphi-fastreport-4.html

The Fast Report Inc. home page has no mention of the Lazarus port. Apparently it is not published yet.

@mannewolff, could you please make a bug report of your LazReport findings in any case, even if you choose another reporting tool.

[jujibo]

No, both LazReport and FastReport are based on FreeReport.
FastReport is a commercial component, LazReport is free.
FastReport is already at version 4.

http://wiki.freepascal.org/LazReport_Documentation
http://www.fast-report.com/en/products/report-generator-for-delphi-fastreport-4.html

Yes I know what wiki and the old Lazreport webpage say, but the source code say it's Fastreport, ie lr_class unit:


{*****************************************}
{                                         }
{             FastReport v2.3             }
{             Report classes              }
{                                         }
{  Copyright (c) 1998-99 by Tzyganenko A. }
{                                         }
{*****************************************}

Probably they only changed the headers and released it... I don't know.

[jujibo]

If you're that dissatisfied with LazReport, you can always try FortesReport which can do what LazReport can do and more. I love it.

It isn't the first time I heard this (about ... can do what Lazreport and more), but nobody say what is it.

Lazreport has useful addons that extends functionality, can create/modify reports definitions so you can change reports without recompiling your program...  of course none of those tools are perfect.

[JuhaManninen]

About FastReport v2.3, you are right jujibo. I don't know either what happened exactly. They must have changed FastReport license after that version.

[rc.1990]

LazReport on Lazarus 1.2 will receive less complaints?
What I mean is if Lazarus 1.2 will correct many bugs related to LazReport.

Someone that have used both LazReport and FortesReport4Lazarus could share his/her experience and talk about the disadvantages and advantages on using FortesReport instead of LazReport?

[taazz]

free report is fast report. a Free reporting tool that required payment to give you access to hte frclasses unit. It is not a different component set than fast report it is fastReport in its very 1st steps.

[motaz]

Someone that have used both LazReport and FortesReport4Lazarus could share his/her experience and talk about the disadvantages and advantages on using FortesReport instead of LazReport?

I have started with LazReport as my first reporting tool with Lazarus before three years ago. The main disadvantage of it is that it has it's own designer and properties editor, and it is limited, also I have faced an error ( I can't recall it now ) when using two reports, then I changed to FortesReport. The main advantage of FortesReport is that you can put the report and it's components in a form and treat the component the same like normal Lazarus component, and use Lazarus property editor, events for report components.
Since three years I have been using FrotesReport with Linux and Windows applications, and it just fine, except for a bug related to Lazarus, which is unability to print Arabic letters in printer or PDF. Luiz Americo has reported this error for me in 2011, and still not solved yet http://bugs.freepascal.org/view.php?id=19435
I have tested today's Trunk version 1.3, revision 43719 and still the Arabic letters are missing in printing report

[Graeme]

You can also use tiRTFReport (included with the tiOPF framework on SourceForge). It allow you to use any RTF editor (eg: OpenOffice or MS Office) to design your template report. Then let the tiRTFReport engine populate it at runtime. I used this for years, and preferred to use OpenOffice as my template editor and "print preview" (because OpenOffice has a very nice "read-only" mode which looks just like a print preview report would). The tiRTFReport has many built-in functions, and allows you to define more functions using Object Pascal. All the usual reporting functionality is supported like master/details, groups etc. You can also generate reports from TDataset, Lists classes or your own objects from memory. It is very flexible.

Since about a year ago, I switched to a PDF reporting engine developed for fpGUI Toolkit. Good news is, that there is actually very little dependency on fpGUI. It should take a couple of minutes work to extract any fpGUI dependencies. I'm actually thinking of doing this so it could maybe be consider for inclusion in FPC's FCL. The PDF reporting engine is just that, an "engine that generates PDF's". It doesn't have any visual designers, but the amount of PDF features it has makes up for it. Coding reports with Object Pascal is pretty easy anyway.

[djzepi]

In some cases
fpvectorial
http://wiki.lazarus.freepascal.org/fpvectorial_-_Text_Document_Support

may be an alternative
(odt and docx files)

[allanregistos]

Since about a year ago, I switched to a PDF reporting engine developed for fpGUI Toolkit. Good news is, that there is actually very little dependency on fpGUI. It should take a couple of minutes work to extract any fpGUI dependencies. I'm actually thinking of doing this so it could maybe be consider for inclusion in FPC's FCL. The PDF reporting engine is just that, an "engine that generates PDF's". It doesn't have any visual designers, but the amount of PDF features it has makes up for it. Coding reports with Object Pascal is pretty easy anyway.

(It might be useful to post here on this old thread rather than creating a new thread.)

Hi, Graeme Geldenhuys,

Summary of my reporting experience with Lazarus.

I'm using Lazarus for the code and build my reports using Jasper Studio.  The good thing of Jasper is that it can be integrated with other reporting tools such as ReportServer or ART (A Reporting Tool- http://art.sourceforge.net/ ). ART is really an amazing reporting product in itself and it can also provide dashboards and many other types of reports you may need. It provide scheduling of reports delivered by email in most common formats.  So I am switching between the two ART and ReportServer depending on the needs.  The only thing that ART has problem with Jasper format is sub reports but really an amazing tool and with a built-in documentation.

I have not touch lazreport for now but I may have take a look.  The reason of my post is that I am curious how you manage your reporting via code. Can you at least provide a sample code for us to have a reference?

Thanks,
Allan