Hi stan,

There is no doubt on what report writer is the most advanced one. This is Crystal Reports. However the best to use within VFP might depend on what you find important to a report writer.

Advantages CR over VFP RW
- Export to various formats
- Better WEB integration
- More control how, when and where to print your report
- The use of subreports
- Runtime control over report objects
- More advanced contional formatting
- Supports a lot of DBs natively, however for VFP you'll have to copy your results to FOX2X.
- Advanced charting possibilities
- Modeless previews, more than 1 preview is possible
- Drill down possibilities
- Search in preview for text
- ...

Disadvantages
- More difficult to integrate within VFP. (you'll need to write classes which take care of this)
- You'll need to install a lot of DLLs on the client in order to make it work.
- Some DLL difficulties (DLL hell), though personally I did not encounter them yet.
- You cannot use general fields to display pictures.
- Crystal Reports is not free, though you can distribute your reports freely (with exception of when using techniques to let the user define their reports themselves, IOW when you created your own report generator)
- Does not support VFP tables natively. Use FOX2X tables in stead.
- ....


Though there are some other (mostly minor problems) they can almost always be done in another way. For example, the report designer is somewhat different than we as VFP developers are used to. However if you're used to the interface, it works pretty well.

Walter,

Walter,