After searching for a light-weight reporting engine which does not come with tons of DLL's we decided to create our own. With an eye on the performance throughout the development, we ended up with a nice product which can be used for fairly cmplex reports.
The report designer is a standard WinForms form so you can drop any control (standard or third party) and it will be rendered in your reports exactly the way you want it.
Following screenshot shows the print-preview of a Sale Invoice created using GillSoft Report Engine in GSSalesManager.
Download sample Sale Invoice created using GillSoft Report Engine
The main features are:
- Speed: Due to smaller code base, the performance is quite high in comparison to many other report engines out there.
- Linking with database objects: With various ORM's used in .Net world (we use NHibernate in GillSoft), our report engine is written to use data objects as data source.
- Export to PDF: If you need to export reports as PDF files for distribution, you can do it very easily. All PDF files are 128 bit encrypted.
- Built-in support for creating yearly reports: Want to create reports to help your users in making business decisions? Look no further. With just a few lines of code you can create those reports easily. All the UI is built-in, all you have to do is to write code to provide data for the report. Following screenshot shows one such report implemented in GS Sales Manager:
The above report was created in about 15 minutes worth of effort.