OK, I know there's a Windows developer or two on here so I thought I'd ask your advice.

I am going to be developing a new correspondence component in .net and have a requirement to produce a number of documents, which will be built up from variable wording (and thus variable sized paragraphs) and other optional items depending on the user's choices. The end result should read like a letter, i.e. printed continuously with regular spacing between paragraphs (rather than each section starting in pre-determined positions on the page) and with new pages as and when the need arises.

We recently outsourced another system with similar requirements and their solution was to use Crystal Reports, howewer the documents I have seen seem to be a bit hit and miss as regards to layout. (The overall quality of the entire system they have produced seems to be a bit suspect IMHO but that's another story...)

I'm not familiar with Crystal Reports, but as far as I can see it seems to be basically very much like the old Access reporting system in terms of specifying set layout, which is great for actual reports based on repeating data but not that good for what I will have to achieve which will not be based on tables of data. The more I think about it the more I'm convincing myself that this is not the solution I'm looking for, but perhaps I'm just missing the full picture.

My question is this:

Is Crystal Reports likely to provide me with what I want - the ability to vary the size of sections of the report (or not print sections at all) at run time without user intervention whilst maintaining a continuous and flowing style?

Yes in a word - very powerful if you get into it, although i would say that it is A LOT harder than you would think. One of the girls who works for me is now an 'expert' after doing it constantly for 3 years!

Yes in a word - very powerful if you get into it, although i would say that it is A LOT harder than you would think. One of the girls who works for me is now an 'expert' after doing it constantly for 3 years!

I've been writing them for just over 5 years

They're easy to write if your just simply outputting the contents of a database....its when you start adding in subreports and passing data back through to the main report via shared variables when it starts to get interesting

Luckily i've managed to pass report writing to my replacement and got myself a promotion now so i only really help out nowdays

Looks like 'interesting' times are ahead then!

Cheers guys

They are also web deployable through crystal enterprise. great tool. been working with it for more years than I care to remember since version 5. version 11 has got some outstanding features. only thing is crystal enterprise licences are not cheap.