We are moving towards client-side front-end development and wants to use AngularJS for it, I want to know is there any way we could use our crystal reports with AngularJS with it.
Our Server-side is ASP.Net webapi/ MS SQL Server.
It would be lovely if we can use our existing crystal reports, if at all its not possible to use crystal reports, then some experts kindly let us know what would be the other best solution for reporting with a framework like AngularJS.
Thanks and best regards
PS: Its amazing there are so many client-side framework but no reporting framework.
Disclaimer: I work for STOIC
I don't know any integration with Crystal Report built with AngularJS. But if you need a reporting solution built on top of AngularJS, you might want to take a look at STOIC, especially the View Editor component.
I feel that to thoroughly answer your question, we must define what is meant by "reporting." In terms of Crystal Reports, the basic functionality is to prompt the user with a form to enter their parameters for filtering the report, then a view is displayed with the data presented in some layout, usually a data grid, more than one data grid, some charts or graphs, or a combination of all of the above. There are features to drill-down into detail or different sub-reports, to group rows with additional content inserted inline, to affect your data model with code, aka "formulas," and also to modify your query results, using formulas without, actually writing any SQL. Reports can embed Flash, HTML, Java applets, and Silverlight. Reports can be faithfully exported to various formats, namely PDF, Excel, CSV, and Word. The basic functionality of Crystal also allows defining data structures for report exportation, such as XML structured via XSLT. There are SDKs for Java and .Net, and a Javascript API. Reports can be embedded into webpages, rendered inline using javascript, and embedded into Java or .Net applications with a license that allows free distribution. That's just scraping the surface of the feature set, and not even touching the other server platform products offered by SAP, Inc.
Now, if you can do without some of those features, or pick and choose, your options open up greatly. I imagine there are some frameworks out there that support Crystal's entire feature set, but I find the terms to be misleading, and quite often, they're just loaded marketing phrases; for instance, "reports" is often referred to as "views", "grids" or "datagrids" in other frameworks. If you need a canned solution that automatically provides the entire featureset, I think Crystal would be your best bet, and their Javascript API will allow you to display them in a webpage.
There are a few ways I know of but they require Crystal Enterprise Server, or SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence suite, or $$
With Enterprise Server you publish all of your reports which allow you to call them via URL with the parameters. This link/url will generate an enterprise viewer in the browser that initiates the crystal report call.
With BusinessObjects there is also a JavaScript API which essentially does the same thing except you can customize and embed the tools, (I haven't used this before) but still $$
https://help.sap.com/businessobject/product_guides/boexir4/en/xi4_cr_js_api_en.pdf
Last option is purchase 3rd party like ReCrystalize, but that you have to install on your webserver and runs about 1k bucks.
AngularJS is just a javascript binding framework. Unrelated to server-side products such as Crystal Reports. In order to call initiate the reports from javascript, you need to call some api, or create a client side page like c# that calls the report on the server side.
You can also use a product called DreamFactory which calls an php service or another service which essentially does the same thing.
Hope this helps.