.Net creating reports from objects

Question

I wish to create reports (mainly PDF) from my business entity objects. The features I would like are:

1. Be able to define the report template in a designer
2. Be able to bind the report to a collection of business objects at run-time.
3. Export the report as PDF, Excel, (other formats such as XML, etc would be a bonus).

One such product is the ReportViewer that comes as part of Visual Studio. But I was wondering what other products were out there and the reasons you decided to use them instead of the bundled ReportViewer.

Answer 1

we are useing stimulsoft in our project,

DevExpress XtraReports is a famous reporting tool too

Also I like this open source lib for wpf reporting

Answer 2

With XtraReports from DevExpress you can do this task easily:

public static XtraReport CreateReport(object data, string dataMember)
{
    XtraReport result = new XtraReport();
    result.Name "the_report_name";
    result.LoadLayout(@"c:\the_path\the_repx_template.repx");
    result.DataSource = data;
    if ( !string.IsNullOrEmpty(dataMember) ) { result.DataMember = dataMember; }
    return result;
}

Then you can use one of the following methods for exporting your report to the desired format (apply to XtraReport class):

public void ExportToPdf(string path);
public void ExportToRtf(string path);
public void ExportToText(string path);
public void ExportToXls(string path);
public void ExportToXlsx(string path);
public void ExportToHtml(string path);
public void ExportToCsv(string path);
public void ExportToImage(string path, ImageFormat format);

I have commented about this at: Alternative to Excel as ASP.Net Report Generator