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[Brad L]

I’ve used Crystal Reports extensively for 18 years.  Never found it wanting.   I’ve now used SSRS (aka: Paginated Reports) extensively for 2 months (about 8 production reports).

CR score: 8 out of 10.  There’s room for improvement, but overall it’s a great enterprise-grade product.
SSRS score:  2 out of 10.  Put politely, “it’s rudimentary”.  Put impolitely, “it’s a POS”.

I just heard about “Crystal Reports for Visual Studio” (a Microsoft product) from someone who’s certified and used it extensively.  He said the report definition is saved as a .rdl XML file just like SSRS, has Crystal Report’s rich feature set (truly collaborative sub reports, true variables, robust running totals, robust dynamic SQL generator, robust true table joins, rich line drawing, etc), and it’s fully supported on the SSRS Server.  Also; it’s free with a Visual Studio Pro license; ie: Microsoft has worked out some deal with SAP!

This is too much to hope for, but can I can I?  Publish a CR .rdl file to the PBI service as a Paginated Report?

Please can I?

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Brad L
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[Sam Duval]

You can at least try and see what happens. I’m guessing while it might accept the file, it won’t render correctly. There were some subtle changes that you couldn’t take a .rdl file from an SSRS sever and drop it into a paginated workspace and have it run as-is/as-seen. I am not sure what those features were as our paginated reports where fairly simple tabular exports, so we didn’t loose anything in the conversion.

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Sam Duval
Data Quality Analyst
Element Financial
Indianapolis IN
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[Brad L]

I was hoping to find someone who’s tried; maybe some tips and guidance on what works / doesn’t.  Or maybe, that it’s just entirely unsupported.

MS Docs has a list of “rdl features not supported on PBI Service” that includes things like custom fonts, but I got the feeling they were talking about SSRS features, not all RDL possibilities.  No mention of CR features, that supposedly are supported by the SSRS server.  As if Microsoft has never oversold something, haha.  CR has some nice features, but its biggest plus is the ease-of-use; something we can only hope Microsoft has preserved in the translation.

I should be in a position to try it in a month or so, so will post my findings.  It just seems so unlikely to succeed that it seems like another fruitless rabbit-hole so I’m not very hopeful, but occasionally those do pan out.

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Brad L
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