PDFsharp & MigraDoc Foundation

Hi,

We are migrating all our Crystal Reports PDFs to MigraDocs/PDFSharp. I am working on the attached form right now. It is fairly complex, and has many different sections. The report needs to look exactly the same.

Do you believe this can be accomplished using just MigraDocs? Or will I have to use a combination of MigraDocs/PDFSharp?

I am confident that I could build out each individual section of this report if they were to standalone on their own pages. However, I am struggling to understand how I can get all the sections to align like this on the page, and have the borders around them.

Can you please provide me with a few tips/suggestions on where I should get started, and what features I should use? For example, should I use PDFSharps ability to draw a rectangle around each section? If I draw a rectangle with PDFSharp, can I simply insert a MigraDoc table inside of this rectangle?


Thank you,
Nick

I haven't used PDFSharp/MigraDoc in too many cases, but I would question using it as a report development tool.

It is a very powerful tool - however I am uncertain it is a reporting solution. Simple things like section suppressing, keep section together, repeat header on each page and physical report design are all benefits of Crystal Reports. For example, CR provides you a designer to build your report design. Whereas with PDFSharp/MigraDoc, you would need to programmatically create this design - it would be like developing HTML without a designer, but harder IMO. Simple modifications (i.e. move this field or delete this field) will become much more difficult - you will need to search through the source code for the particular field you want (rather than visually seeing it in the designer). Testing will be more complex as there is no designer preview tool built in.

Hi!
MigraDoc creates documents much like Word does, but you do it from code.
Doing it from code is not a general disadvantage over a designer IMHO. It even gives you advantages if you have to prepare data for the report.

And MigraDoc can keep paragraphs together, will repeat header and footer on all pages.

_________________
Regards
Thomas Hoevel
PDFsharp Team

In some cases, no designer is good. I knew the HTML example was a bad one because I've never in life used an HTML designer. However at the same time, the layout of a website is typically pretty generic - header area, menu area (either left or top) and body area. Then within the body area you do whatever you want...

Anyhow, I guess my point in this was that it is possible. But personally, working as a developer and designing/developing business systems for the company I work for, I couldn't fathom trying to generate a report design and keep it up to date with PDFSharp/MigraDoc - not saying the capability isn't there. It would be more of a concern in regards to maintenance - having to update it, add in things or giving it to another person to update. The user should think about the amount of time it would take to learn this new technology and implement it, and the cost of that if the company were to get a new developer in that had to maintain this - they would then need to invest that same amount of time to learn this new technology. I spent days fine-tuning the small amount of work we did with this - add a table to the bottom of an existing PDF document.

The first version of MigraDoc came with a Word add-in that used Word as a designer for MigraDoc.
The current version of MigraDoc does not (yet) have such a designer. We use MigraDoc to create reports from code - sometimes this is better than working with a designer, sometimes a designer would save some time.
To some extent this is a matter of experience.

_________________
Regards
Thomas Hoevel
PDFsharp Team

I ended up building out the entire report using PDFSharp. Once I started working with it, I realized how powerful of a tool it truly is. I was able to build each section of the report independently, and the coordinate calculations are contained within the specific section. This allows me to make changes to the layout of the report fairly easily. This document seems to change every month, because doctors can't make up their minds. I will keep you posted on my experience with making modifications to the report. However my experience so far is much better than Crystal. Getting elements to line up EXACTLY how I want them on the page is so much easier in code, then in the Crystal designer.

I can post the code if anyone cares to see it as an example. There's some refactoring to do, but I think it works pretty well.


Cheers,
Nick

Hello NickYoung68,

thank you for offering to donate your code producing "ClinicalForm_PDFSHARP" - I would appreciate it very, if you could post or email it!
Best regards
kaheiho