RavenDB Meets Stimulsoft Reporting

This is a small demo project that shows how you can consume data from RavenDB in a Stimulsoft Report.

• Very simple ASP.Net MVC4 application.
• Uses RavenDB 2.5 Unbounded Results API
• Uses Stimulsoft's HTML5 (aka "Mobile") Viewer for MVC

##Setup

• Get Stimulsoft Reporting from their Download Page.
  • The trial version will work fine, but reports will be watermarked as "DEMO".
  • I used version 2013.2.
  • You can download either the "Reports.Web" or "Reports.Ultimate" product.
• Run the Stimulsoft Installer
• Clone or copy this project.
• The project references Stimulsoft's components from the following path: C:\Program Files (x86)\Stimulsoft Reports.Ultimate 2013.2 Trial\Bin
  If you installed to a different path, update your references.
• Build the solution and run it.
• Be patient. It has to do all of the following:
  • Download RavenDB.Embedded and other components from Nuget
  • Build the solution
  • Import the Northwind sample data (included)
  • Build indexes
  • Run the report
• After the first run, and you see the report successfully, subsequent runs should be much faster.

##NOTES / TODO

• The report definition should probably be saved in the database rather than read from the App_Data folder.
• There is currently just a single reporting index and a single report.
• The Stimulsoft designer should be wired up so you can dynamically create new reports, save them back to RavenDB, and run them at will.
• There should be some navigation on the demo site to switch between different reports and the designer.
• It would be awesome if you could build a report directly from a RavenDB index stored with the database.
  • Currently it has to have some C# code to load the data.
  • This should be possible, but will require some deeper thought.
• While the report data is streamed out of RavenDB and we use yield to return the results, I believe Stimulsoft is still holding an internal DataSet.
  • Need to investigate how well this holds up with a very large report. Say, > 1,000,000 records.
  • Need to see if there is a way to get Stimulsoft to stream the input data differently.