ComponentOne does the job!
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
We use ComponentOne Studio in some of our custom .NET applications we've developed for our clients. We primarily use the report designer and the grid control that provides features that don't come standard with Visual Studio. These apps are mostly Windows Forms apps. We are a consulting company, so our apps are developed for clients that are in all sorts of industries.
Pros
- The True DBGrid control is nice for showing parent/child relationships and being able to drill down and show the child data. It also is nice for showing summary totals.
- The report engine is great for building custom reports for Win Forms or web apps. It can do everything that Crystal Reports can do.
- They have a good selection of controls that can do just about anything you can imagine.
Cons
- Sometimes it is difficult to figure out where things are in the properties of controls since there are so many things you can drill down into.
- I find myself using Bing or Google a lot to look up how to do something. Some things are not very intuitive.
- Of course, I would always like the price to be cheaper. The high price has caused us to not keep current and have the latest version.
Likelihood to Recommend
C1 is great for creating custom reports. We have client apps where we've created some fairly complicated reports such as invoices and real estate inspections. We also use the True DBGrid in many of our apps since it is so customizable. Its grouping and filtering features are very nice and can provide summary counts and totals at the bottom or right side of the grid that are very handy.
