List & Label is a mature (as you can probably guess from the version number)
general-purpose reporting package that lets you build most anything: tables, lists,
charts, barcodes, form letters, OLE objects....all are within its capabilities.
The information can come from a wide variety of sources, either directly databound
or pushed into the report by your application. And the List & Label piece can
be integrated with just about anything. Combit supplies it in ActiveX, VCL, and
.NET forms, with examples for Access, Visual Basic .NET, C#, Cobol, Visual FoxPro,
Delphi, C++ Builder, and many other environments. If your reporting needs cross
multiple environments, using just one product across them all is a pretty attractive
thought.
The product comes in two basic flavors: the Standard Edition lets the report developer
use the designer and then distribute reports for use of end users, while the Professional
Edition (starting at $903.21) allows you to redistribute the designer as well so
that end users can tweak reports before running them. Either way, there are no runtime
royalties to be paid. When you install the product, you may be overwhelmed at what
ends up on your drive: a large amount of documentation (quite well written), many
samples, a Crystal Reports migration tool, links to more information on the Web
site, and of course the reporting components themselves.
The designer is flexible and reasonably intuitive, with a drag-and-drop design surface
and the ability to preview data, as well as many examples to get you started. It
includes a wide variety of built-in variables and functions, the ability to generate
barcodes without special software, layers, drawing objects, support for HTML formatted
text, and so on. When the user displays a report, they can choose to print it, or
export it in numerous formats including XML, HTML, PDF, JPG, RTF, or Excel (among
others). Performance is excellent, and the ability to let the end user get into
the designer is unusual in a reporting tool (dangerous to some extent, but it's
nice to have the power there for times when you've got a sufficiently sophisticated
user audience).
With all this functionality built right into List & Label, you won't be surprised
that the actual integration with the various development environments is fairly
simple. You're not dealing with a native .NET reporting component here so much as
a reporting component with a shim to make it talk to .NET projects. After adding
the List & Label component to a form (it ends up in the tray, as it's a non-visual
component), you can call its SetDataBinding method to bind it to just about any
data in your application (including, for example, a DataSet, DataTable, DataView,
or IList). From there, call the Design() method to show the designer or the Print()
method to print the report. Pretty much everything else is done within the List
& Label interface, though there is an available object model if you need to
make runtime changes.
Overall, this is a very flexible and mature reporting component that moves well
between both types of reports and different development environments. If you're
looking for just one reporting tool to use and supporting a variety of code, this
is one to look at.