Over the years I have developed many very complex reporting applications using SQL and Excel VBA. SQL was used to retrieve and analyze the data and Excel VBA was used to develop the presentation layer. This past year though there has been an increase demand for web based reports so we started looking for a Web Based Control that would give me the same flexibility of customization as VBA Excel. The object that made the grade for us was Spread for Web Forms developed by Far Point Technologies. It is a web based grid completely customizable to the cell level just like Excel. By using Spread for Web Forms I was able to keep the complex SQL stored procedure code that I had written to import the data into Excel and I was able to re-write the Excel VBA using Spread to reproduce the presentation layer. Considering that the development effort is about 80% for the stored procedure and 20% for the presentation layer, by using Spread we were able to preserve 80% of the work.
Spread supports both VB.Net and C#, works in both Visual Studio 2003 and 2005 and is relatively easy to use. After about a week going through the developers guide and code examples I was able to start coding my first project. For more complex problems that were not covered by the developers guide I found the Far Point forum extremely helpful. On the forum you can post questions, send code examples etc. and within a couple of hours you have an answer from the Far Point support staff. Their relatively quick response time to questions and their great supply of code examples allowed me to keep a good pace of development even when I was a relative rookie at developing web based reports.
If you are looking at re-developing your Excel reports in the .NET environment, I strongly recommend you check out Spread for Web Forms.
Spread supports both VB.Net and C#, works in both Visual Studio 2003 and 2005 and is relatively easy to use. After about a week going through the developers guide and code examples I was able to start coding my first project. For more complex problems that were not covered by the developers guide I found the Far Point forum extremely helpful. On the forum you can post questions, send code examples etc. and within a couple of hours you have an answer from the Far Point support staff. Their relatively quick response time to questions and their great supply of code examples allowed me to keep a good pace of development even when I was a relative rookie at developing web based reports.
If you are looking at re-developing your Excel reports in the .NET environment, I strongly recommend you check out Spread for Web Forms.
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home