Embedded Reports with Stimulsoft

Simple? Kinda sorta. Useful? Absolutely yes.

I can’t believe I didn’t find this product earlier. For the last few months I’ve been searching for an intuitive reporting solution for my LightSwitch projects. There are lots of options for LightSwitch 2011 (Visual Studio 2010) scenarios, but I am more concerned about doing something with the latest release, Visual Studio 2012 (RC).

A couple of days a reader provided a great comment (thanks Roger) about a seemingly unclear message from Microsoft about who the target audience is for LightSwitch. I somewhat agree with the comments in that what is supposed to be an intuitive ”citizen” developer tool, is turning out to be a more code centric than most latent developers would likely care for. Even if I didn’t agree with some the things the comments said, it did get me thinking more, which is a good thing.

I found myself thinking more about some of the problems I have been trying to solve using LightSwitch, such as reporting features embedded within a LightSwitch created application. A few vendors were quick to offer reporting tools and extensions; such as the great DevExpress XtraReport LightSwitch extension, for the first version of LightSwitch. Unfortunately, those same tools are not yet available for Visual Studio 2012. So, being impatient, this prompted me to do some more searching; which is how I happened upon Stimulsoft.

Stimulsoft is an organization who specializes in creating reporting tools for developers. These tools include a great variety if .Net related products. What’s more is that they already have tools that support the latest release of LightSwitch (okay, Silverlight and .Net)! So, I downloaded the tool.

Following a couple of short videos and a blog article on the Stimulsoft site (see here), I managed to get a LightSwitch “report” embedded in my Visual Studio 2012 LightSwitch generated application. The process was relatively easy, however the implementation was not as easy as would have liked if I were a citizen type developer. There is some coding involved, but not much.

After a few days of messing around with the tools, here is my some pros and cons, in the context of using the tools with LightSwitch;

Pros:

Report Designer is feature rich.
Users can save and reload reports from their local hard drive.
A whole bunch of report export features.

Cons:

Not a LightSwitch extension, controls must be added to screens.
Binding intrinsic data source must be done manually (with code).
Coding required to change properties of the controls.
Some events on the controls effect the application – such as closing the app when closing a report.

Notwithstanding the cons, I had some success with the tools. In fact, I’ve been creating some user defined reporting functionality with LightSwitch – a feature in an upcoming post. Here’s a teaser…

A screen users will select a report data source.