Interactive reports in ASP.NET application

Hi, I am looking for some guidance on the way to go for achieving the task described below.

I am working on a project to generate various statistical reports for the Revenue managers.

The application is aimed to be a browser based application usingASP.NET. The reports shall be interactive with all the functionalities like annotations, dynamically changing the range of the x-axis and report-click should take the user to a new report/web page, context menus, multiple reports on the same page - charts and matrix/tabular.

My boss is envisioning the applications to have interactive charts just like those you find on the Yahoo Finance website.http://finance.yahoo.com/charts. They seem to be using the Flash player.

Questions:

We have a license for SQL Server 2005 reporting services. We had a hard time incorporating the SQL Server reports into the
ASP.NET AJAX enabled web application, using the ReportViewer control that comes along with VS2005, and they are pretty much static. Is there a better approach? I have looked at Dundas Charts they don't quite seem to be as interactive as the google finance and yahoo finance charts.Is the same thing possible without SSRS?. In terms of having Flash like report interactivity on the webpages?.Do Silverlight and/or WPF offer me the capability of building a RIA ASP.NET website (Rich Internet Application) with support for charting.

Any reponse is appreciated.

Thanks

Your boss is envisioning something that has taken a lot of work to put together. Have you checked how much he's willing to invest?

As to the questions:

1. Dundas charts is pretty much the top of the game as far as 3rd party charting components goes. Especially for charts that integrate with SSRS

2. Yes. You need to do a bit (lot) more work. Get the data yourself, format it yourself, present it yourself. Google and Yahoo look so good because they spend a lot of time getting each chart just right, and they're all custom built.

3. Silverlight. You should be able to do something like this, buit it might take a bit more work to get right. 3rd party Flash based charting is probably easier as a starting point.

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Thanks for the response.

I have come accross Adobe Flex 2, which boasts of its highly interactive rich charing controls of presentation on client browsers.

Can we integrate ASP.NET applications with those client components developed etc.

Just curious.

Thanks.

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I don't know about the Adobe Flex charts but the I've used Infosoft Global Charts in an Asp.Net application with good results. They are also Flash charts that allow for some good interactivity with moseovers and onclicks. You pass data to them in XML format and they animate very nicely. They also have a good JavaScript library so you can set/reset the data on the client-side in order to refresh them via Ajax if necessary.

Here's a link to their chart gallery.

http://www.fusioncharts.com/Gallery.asp

Hope this helps,

Al

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alcsharp, Thank you so much.

I will check it right away. I am leaving this post open for now so I can get more ideas from the folks.

Later!