devexpress xtrareports versus reporting services

I am a new devexpress user and was looking at the xtra reports product. I was wondering, what are the advantages of using this over reporting services. They have a policy of not discussing other products on their site so I am wondering what the advantages are are why I should consider 开发者_JAVA技巧using them instead of RS. I am starting a new project so I am flexible to the solution at this point. I know RS well (also Crystal) and I am happy to use a new technology if I know what I could get from it.

thanks for any feedback.

I know this question is old but I use both XtraReports and SQL Reporting Services in the project I work on so maybe some contrasting could still benefit someone.

Xtra Reports are very similar to Crystal is their use of bands. It is very quick and easy to throw together a report with a header, detail, and footer. The bands easily keep things in scope and DevEx handles knowing which fields are collections and can be turned into detail reports. Also the 'Calculated Fields' that Xtra provide are useful for reusing the same custom formulas.

Reporting Services provide more flexibility by implementing tables and matrices instead of using bands. Actually getting a finished report out of it takes a bit longer, and getting exactly what you want with nested reports and detail reports takes quite a bit more fiddling and practice, but in the end you have more flexibility to do things that Xtra is not built for, like running reports side-by-side on the same page or organizing the report any way you want instead of being restricted to horizontal bands. Another downside to Reporting Services is that it doesn't have the Calculated Field support that Xtra does which means anytime you have a custom formula or expression that you want to use more than once you have to copy and paste it into each individual field. SSRS is also good with built-in fields like Execution Time, Page numbers and such while in Xtra you kinda have to do some digging to find those global variables.

In conclusion I would go with SSRS in the long run because it provides much more flexibility. The management system is great for creating linked reports also if you want to save different reports with different parameters.

Hopefully that is helpful to someone. Good luck!

Test both products and you can see the advantages for yourself. If you based your decision on others opinion, you might get stuck.