Description
Every week the business side wants the same sales breakdown, so you run the SQL, export to Excel, fix the formatting and send the mail — again. Buying a BI product means a quote priced per seat. Seal Report is MIT-licensed and takes the whole pipeline off your hands: drag fields into a model, schedule it, and let the result email itself or land in a folder.
It comes in two halves. Report Designer is the Windows application — a tree of sources, models, views and outputs on the left, four drop zones in the middle for page, column, row and data elements, restrictions underneath, and an Execute button; press F7 if you want to read the SQL it generated. The other half is a web server: publish a report and everyone else opens it in a browser, picks their parameters and reads the charts, with nothing to install.
Drag-and-drop report models: pull fields from the source schema into Page, Column, Row and Data areas and the joins and columns are added for you instead of hand-written.
SQL and LINQ models: SQL models hit the database directly, while LINQ models combine several sources — including different databases — inside one report.
Prompt at execution: any restriction can ask the reader for a value, so one report with a date range, a category and a customer prompt replaces ten near-identical ones.
Schedules and outputs: run reports on a schedule and render to HTML or PDF, emailed automatically or written to a directory — the weekly export stops being a manual job.
Web report server: reports organised in folders with search, sorting and permissions, viewed in a browser with charts and tables rendered live.
Charts and interactive tables: Chart.js and DataTables rendering is built in, with sample reports covering bars, lines, gauges and Pareto graphs, plus tables with fixed headers and scrolling.
C# scripting hooks: pre-load, post-load and final scripts let you clean data, compute per-row values or reshape the output without leaving the tool.
A sample repository in the box: the install ships a full set of example reports, from a plain list to cross tabs, ETL tasks and PDF output — quicker to adapt than to build from scratch.
It comes in two halves. Report Designer is the Windows application — a tree of sources, models, views and outputs on the left, four drop zones in the middle for page, column, row and data elements, restrictions underneath, and an Execute button; press F7 if you want to read the SQL it generated. The other half is a web server: publish a report and everyone else opens it in a browser, picks their parameters and reads the charts, with nothing to install.
Features
Drag-and-drop report models: pull fields from the source schema into Page, Column, Row and Data areas and the joins and columns are added for you instead of hand-written.
SQL and LINQ models: SQL models hit the database directly, while LINQ models combine several sources — including different databases — inside one report.
Prompt at execution: any restriction can ask the reader for a value, so one report with a date range, a category and a customer prompt replaces ten near-identical ones.
Schedules and outputs: run reports on a schedule and render to HTML or PDF, emailed automatically or written to a directory — the weekly export stops being a manual job.
Web report server: reports organised in folders with search, sorting and permissions, viewed in a browser with charts and tables rendered live.
Charts and interactive tables: Chart.js and DataTables rendering is built in, with sample reports covering bars, lines, gauges and Pareto graphs, plus tables with fixed headers and scrolling.
C# scripting hooks: pre-load, post-load and final scripts let you clean data, compute per-row values or reshape the output without leaving the tool.
A sample repository in the box: the install ships a full set of example reports, from a plain list to cross tabs, ETL tasks and PDF output — quicker to adapt than to build from scratch.
