Microsoft Reporting Services && Crystal Reports && ClearQuest

scojones

Hello folks,
I have a few questions in realtion to the three products in the topic of this post, I have been googling since mid-last week, and can't seem to find the answers to the questions below. Please note I'm not wishing to be spoonfed, however I would like to chat with someone who has used these products, or point me in the direction of a forum better suited perhaps.


Reporting Services
1 Can Microsoft Report Services integrate with ClearQuest database? I've tried to contact both rational and ms, but have received no reply from both parties as of yet.
2 Is there any third party products which can make use of the RDL format (report format)? Hense eliminating the need for vs.net for integration with Report Designer, I think it's a joke that you need to have vs.net in order to design reports.

Crystal Reports
1 Can Crystal Reports integrate with a ClearQuest database?
2 Is Crystal Reports a better reporting solution than Report Services with respect to heterogeneity, automation, ease of use?

Thanks a million in advance!

Kernel32

I have been using Reporting Services on a new product in development and I love it, never want to touch Crystal again.

Now can it talk to ClearQuest? The answer is yes and no. Out of the box it probably couldn't unless there is a ADO.Net data provider or an odbc driver. One of the cool things with reporting services is that it is extensible in several areas, one being the the data provider area. The report designer and the report renderer all use a DataExtension to get the data. The data is always returned in a dataset format. Reporting Services comes with a few DataExtensions already built but you can make your own as well. In the product I am working on I had to do that because some of the data is stored in the database and some is stored in XML. By making my own DataExtension I was able to query the data as if it came from a single datasource. There are some chapters in the help file on how to do this, I also did some googling on it because it wasn't well documented. Basically you create a class library with a set of classes that implement special interfaces like Microsoft.ReportingServices.DataProcessing.IDbConnection and
Microsoft.ReportingServices.DataProcessing.IDbCommand. You then have to do some config changes the the XML config files for the designer and the server and thats it. Using this type of model you can make any datasource appear as a dataset to the report. In your case ClearQuest may have some sort of API which you can wrap up in the DataExtension.

As for a third party designer, I didn't see any when I looked but it wouldn't surprise me to see some pop up. The designer in VS.Net isn't fantastic but not bad for a first version.

I have found Reporting Services to have much better ease of use. Configuration is in clear text XML files. You can turn on verbose logging to track problems. Deployment is a breeze. Administration is great, it uses the sharepoint engine. I can debug everything, my dataextension, custom report extensions etc. All of the above was a pain in the rear with Crystal. There is a learning curve though. If you consider yourself to be knowledgeable of the framework, VS.Net, OOP in general(classes and interfaces) then its not bad, otherwise you could struggle.

scojones

Thanks alot for the speedy reply Kernel32. I appreciate it (:

I'm pretty sure I can interface with ClearQuest, as there is a perl module and a vbscript way of interfacing with a ClearQuest DB. I will have to have a look into this a bit more and come up with some sort of wrapper => hopefully it won't be too much of a hack. You say deployment is a breeze and administration is great, could you go into a bit more detail on that? I'm just wondering what the setup and administration overhead would be.

Once again, thanks (:

Kernel32

I'm not sure how far you have researched setup and deployment so I will tell you what I know. First you should have a licensed version of SQL Server, you need SQL Server because all the reports are stored there along with the admin tool. Also keep in mind its a reporting service, what this means is it isn't for distributing reports with a windows app, the reports are rendered from a server. You can access reports from a URL or through a web service. Using the web service you can take the output of the report and do whatever you want with it even.

The administration tool is web based and its basically a sharepoint front end. From here you can upload reports, manage security, manage caching, snapshots and scheduling. One of the cool things is that the connection information is stored seperately from the report and you can share connection information. So say you have a connection to a database, but 50 different reports use it. You can change the connection information just once and all the reports use the new information. Its actually kind of similar to System DSN's. You can run reports from in here too and look at histories. Reports are deployed through a simple HTTP upload or through a web service. VS.Net can do it through the web service and you could build your own deployment mechanism as well. The web service also allows you to modify the structure of a report and save it back, you could build your own simple report designer if you wished.

Things can get a little tricky once you write your own extensions. You have to modify various XML config files and you need to learn about permissions etc. It gets really interesting because an extension used from the designer (running as the interactive user) may not work when deployed(running as an anon user). The problem always lies in permissions so be aware of that.

I am using it for an application thats hosted and sold on a subscription basis and it works great for us. I can have the entire report piece run on seperate hardware if I want and I can easily have reports updated without touching the application.

scojones

Woah, that's really neat. Thanks alot once again. I'm aware that the report server will be running windows, which is not too much of a problem. One of my concerns is that alot of the clients who want to create general reports may not be on windows or be able to use Visual Studio .NET to create them ( I had a look at http://www.rdlcomponents.com but it's not great at all ).
Also, since you can run and view the reports through a browser, can Unix / Linux clients run and view the reports? Is there any special plugins that the browser would need?

Another concern of mine is that if I tell the company I work for to take this on board, SQL Server 2005 will be out soon, we should be able to upgrade, right?

I'm sorry for the amount of questions, it's just a bit frustrating that nobody working here has any idea about *any* of this.
Thanks again, you're a great help.


P.S Excel can plug in to the ClearQuest db too, so i'm pretty sure it's safe to say that reporting services will be able to too, seeing as clearquest is just sitting on top of oracle / sql server