Hi,

I have the plan to give the visitor to my website the possiblilty to create their own catalogue in pdf format.

I have an enormous database with a lot of interesting data and many, many different photos.

So, my plan is to offer the visitor a selection screen with some dropdowns to filter and customize their own personal, published book.

My questions are:

- how do I achieve this! I am familiar with asp.net, but I haven't studied on chrystal reports until now! What options are their to create a nice layout in pdf.

- Do you foresee performance issues when visotors go for the complete "book" = 2000 products = 1000 physical pages?

- any other advice is welcome

 I work with the latest VS 2008 and I use currently an Access database, but plan to upgrade to SQLServer 2008 later in the year.

Thanks already, Kees

 Considering you plan to upgrade to SQL2008, I'd recommend SQL Server Reporting Services as your report solution here. For the performance issues, I'd say try to avoid generating reports over 1000 pages. It definitely will  bring you the performance hack. In the real scenario,  do you think how many users would be interested in reading 1000+ pages report? Try to filter the data.

maybe you can try to use a PDF Print Drive. for example, pdf955. this one is free.

Thans for these 2 replies.

I will analyse both options before I start to study on it.

I see many examples for the Report Server where you can make user friendly way a report with summaries and totals etc.

My objective is to make a sjabloon (is that English?) / format to create a catalogue / encyclopedy with descriptions of a product with a professional layout with all the fancy layout options in it.

Is that no problem for SQLServer report services?

Kees

Kees:

Thans for these 2 replies.

I will analyse both options before I start to study on it.

I see many examples for the Report Server where you can make user friendly way a report with summaries and totals etc.

My objective is to make a sjabloon (is that English?) / format to create a catalogue / encyclopedy with descriptions of a product with a professional layout with all the fancy layout options in it.

Is that no problem for SQLServer report services?

 

Kees

 Hi kees,

 
Report layout in the reporting services is quite flexible. It supports table, matrix and list(free format). I'm sure you'll get what you want after looking into it.