There are many options out there for .net reporting engines, such as: Telerik De

Question

There are many options out there for .net reporting engines, such as:

Telerik
DevExpress
ActiveReports
Stimulsoft
Gembox
Aspose
etc...

What we would like

A visual report writer (banded style)
A per-developer seat license model (< US$700 a developer)
Needs to export out to many formats (PDF, Word, Excel, Richtext, etc)
Easy component model that our junior level developers can understand
Can generate reports through code or visual report writer
Visual report writer generates a file that we can edit outside the designer (ie: non binary/proprietary)
Doesn't matter if it's XML based or if it generates code.

What we want to stay away from:

Crystal Reports
Any engine that requires per-server licenses
Anything that will require me to sell my soul to the devil to afford

Some of these listed above even feature the ability for the end user to edit reports in an HTML5 tool, and it would be nice, but not required.

Its going to be a huge investment to get our team setup, so I want to make sure I do it right up front, so I'm coming here.

So my question is, what are you using? It's pros/cons? What engine would you recommend?

And have I missed any "major players" on my list?

Thanks for you opinions!

Explanation / Answer

We've been using the DevExpress offering (XtraReports Suite) for several years now. For the most part it has worked wonderfully, and on the rare occasions when it hasn't their customer support has been able to provide the answer (and in one case a work-around until a bug we'd uncovered got fixed).

Having said that, our use of XtraReports has not been an entirely smooth ride. Problems we ran into include:

"Messy" Excel export if columns are not exactly aligned.
The "Update wizard" does not always do the right thing in complex reports (source code control is your friend).
The REPX format has some limitations when it comes to calculated content. (Complex non-standard calculations would be better handled by the data model, not the report - which I would suggest is good practice anyway.)

Overall, in our scenario the benefits outweigh the pain points and I would certainly recommend giving XtraReports a quick evaluation. Only you can decide if it fully meets your needs. Good luck!

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