What considerations should be made when creating a reporting framework for a business?

It's a pretty classic problem. The company I work for has numerous business reports开发者_高级运维 that are used to track sales, data feeds, and various other metrics. Of course this also means that there is a conglomerate of disparate frameworks, ASP.net pages, and areas where these reports can be found. There have been some attempts at consolidating these into a single entity, but nothing has stuck yet.

Since this is a common problem, and I am sure solved innumerable times, I wanted to see what others have done. For the most part these can be boiled down to the following pieces:

• A SQL query against our database to gather data
• A presentation of data, generally in a data grid
• Filtering that can vary based on data types and the business needs
• Some way to organize the reports, a single drop down gets long and unmanageable quickly
• A method to download data to alter further, perhaps a csv file

My first thought was to create a framework in Silverlight with Linq to Sql. Mainly just because I like it and want to play with it which probably is not the best reason. I also thought the controls grant a lot of functionality like sorting, dragging columns, etc. I was also curious about the printing in Silverlight 4.

Which brings me around to my original question, what is the best way to do this? Is there a package out there I can just buy that will do it for me? The Silverlight approach seems pretty easy, after it's setup and templated, but maybe it's a bad idea and I can learn from someone else?

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It may sound contrived, but we just used SSRS. Once it is installed, the /ReportServer web site does a decent job of managing and organizing reports, permissions, etc. You can also make wrappers in front of SSRS via ASP.Net controls or via SharePoint, etc. Cost = free. It works nicely via SQL Developer edition too.

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If your SQL service is MS SQL Server 2005+ then I would definitely recommend SQL Service Reporting Services. It covers all the cases you outlined very well and is very easy to get into for someone already familiar with SQL.

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myDBR reporting tool might be suitable for you. With myDBR you can create reports quite easily using the built in Query Builder. Once your reports are done you can organize them in categories and also specify access rights for users and user groups.

You can fully concentrate on creating your report content (using SQL) and myDBR will take care of the data presentation. For example creating charts from data is just a matter of adding one extra line to your stored procedure.

myDBR also provides Single-Sign-On Integration so that your users can continue to log in with their already existing username/password.

The tool is also very affordable, community version is free of charge and premium version is only 129 EUR / year.

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We use FastReport .NET. It supports SQL Query, presentation of data in datagrid, filtering, export in many popular formats (PDF, DOC, XLS, CSV, DBF, etc.).