Should I buy Obout controls? [closed]

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Closed 8 years ago.

We started a new project and the nature of the project is very interactive and a Rich UI is required.

We would need a set of controls that would require for Rich UI development. I found Obout while googling. I never heard about them and never seen fellow members telling me such name except Telerik, ComponentOne, NetAdvantage. These are the famous names we heard but no this one.

But, the controls give a positive feeling. But as two things matter always when you are buying some services: How good are their customer support? and How much feasible their price is?

Another, how quickly they release patches/updates? As, what if we find a bug or an error during development what will going to happen? Do they provide a quick solution for this?

I'm bit confused making a decision here. I need your assistance, experience and feedback.

Answer 1

I've used Obout controls before. They are definitely lesser known than something like Telerik or ComponentOne, but they've been around for quite a while and definitely put out a quality product. They are also a good deal less expensive. Overall I had a very positive experience with them and never had any trouble with support requests at all. My first experience with them was about 5 years ago and they were very good then, and they've only gotten better.

I don't know specifically how quickly they put out releases, but I can tell you that over the past few years they have released a whole lot of new stuff. I believe you can download all the controls and try them out before you buy them, so I would encourage you to do that. If it meets your needs and you find it easier to use than the alternatives then go for it.

Also check out this question to see some additional feedback: Obout controls in C# .Net

Answer 2

Don't think so. I bought their suite and everytime i tried to use one of their controls, it sucked.

Example 1. I use their grid and want to take advantage of the filtering options. For 400 records, the grid only filters in the twenty records that are on the first page. So it leaves out the majority of the records. I got in contact with their support and i sent them the files they asked for. That was five month ago and despite repeated tries and emails, i never got an answer.

Example 2: Today i am using their datepicker. Nice try, but it opens in a weird position on the page and there is no possibility to change that.

Answer 3

We have been using their tools for over a year now, and we are very pleased with them. The cost is a fraction of what the competition is charging. They work great, they look nice and it reduced our development so that our project was completed two months before expected, even with learning the new tools.

The learning curve is a little steep, but that goes for any of the comparable packages. The tech support sucks, by email only. When we first purchased it they had a support forum and you could find most of your answers in the forum, but sadly they did away wit hit. Now it takes a few days to get a response. But when doing an entire application, we had plenty of pages to work on while waiting for responses. Most of the time they pointed out the problems or told us how to resolve them. And I sent them many messages telling them to disregard previous queries, having found the answers on the internet.

Their examples are simple, and if your needs are simple they will suffice. If building a full-blown application to replace a legacy application and run your business, such as we did, you need better support. Still, it was money well spent. We use the grid and filters to perform searches on our client database of 200,000 records, and can usually find the person we need in less than 10 keystrokes by name alone. Performance is very good on our intranet.

I will note that when I thought I had found bugs in the software, it was just me. A comma where a period should be, bad capitalization, misuse of functions, etc. Javascript is very sensitive with it's syntax and not friendly with error messages, so much time was spent going over code to discover the not-so-obvious errors.

And our demands are probably beyond most peoples needs, our main screen has a combination of a superform and 7 data grids, each of which pops up a modal form for data entry, all within the same web page. But it does the job well. All in all, we have about 60 data entry pages and another 60 reporting pages we created with the oBout tools. The reporting pages allow the users to set report criteria (i.e. dates, clients, products, etc. using popups, calendars, radio buttons, etc.) and pass these to SSRS reports, a sort of ad-hoc reporting. So we created a projects with over 125 web pages and over 150 reports in less than one year, quite an achievement considering the small workforce.

Answer 4

If I were you I'd look strongly at using jQuery and the hundreds of great plug-ins that will provide just about any functionality you need. jQuery is heavily supported and best of all it's free (open source).

It will provide all the client-side functionality you need and it's VERY easy to work with. One of the things you really need to use jQuery is to have control over the id and names of your HTML controls (DOM elements). When you use those third-party control packs (and most of the built-in ones in .net too) you typically lose a good deal of control of the HTML they produce. You can either wait for asp.net 4.0 to come out which will resolve the control id issues or rely on repeater controls and have complete control over the ids and other HTML it produces.

It's well worth the small investment in learning jQuery and the repeater control if you haven't done so already.

Answer 5

I used Obout controls several years ago (from memory, their ASP.Net TreeView and Slidemenu).

I think I had to contact them on a couple of occasions, and received prompt support both times, solving the problem we had.

However, whether their controls (in terms of UI, API) meet your expectations is quite a personal thing- the support is good, but you might find that you don't like the look of them, or the API doesn't fit in with the way you do things (although it was fine for me). You should really evaluate them yourself and see how you get on with them.

Answer 6

if you don't need something too well integrated into asp.net, definetly have a look at extjs. its THE rich ui library.

Answer 7

I am using Obout controls. And clearly I would have done another choice If I could. The controls are bulky and quite often buggy when you try to inherits from them. A poor choice to me.