Datasheet

This Report Designer (covered in Chapter 3, “Designing Reports”) features a number of experts (or wiz-
ards) to help you get started creating a report. It will guide you through the report development process,
from selecting a data source and the field that will appear on your report, to determining what records
should appear.
Once you have a basic report designed, you can then add features like formula fields, running totals,
graphs, and so on to make your report design as complex as required. Reports come in all shapes, sizes,
and forms. You may want to create a report that can be used to print an invoice from your application, to
compile statistics for a management report, or to produce an inventory count sheet.
You don’t even have to constrict yourself to a particular size or shape; reports can be created that print
shipping labels or address labels and can include bar codes, pictures, graphics, and so on.
After you have created a report, you need some way to display it from your application. Crystal Reports
.NET has two different viewers to make this happen. The Windows Forms Viewer (which we look at in
Chapter 4, “Report Integration for Windows-Based Applications”) can be used with Windows applica-
tions to preview any reports you have integrated into your application. It features a rich object model
that allows you to control the appearance of the viewer and some aspects of the report at run time.
You can add this viewer to any form in your application, either as the sole content of the form or as one
of several form components. You can control the viewer’s appearance, changing toolbars, and other
visual aspects, even creating your own icons and buttons to control the viewer and its actions, like the
viewer shown in Figure 1-3.
For Web-based applications, there is also a Web Forms Viewer (Chapter 5, “Report Integration for Web-
Based Applications”) that has similar functionality and allows you to view reports you have integrated
into your Web applications. You can add this viewer to Web pages within your application and show a
report either on its own page, in a frameset, or like the report in Figure 1-4, side by side with other
application content; it is up to you.
For complete control over your report, regardless of whether you are viewing it through the Windows
or Web Forms Viewers, you also have access to the Report Engine (see Chapter 9, “Working with the
Crystal Reports Engine”). This will allow you to control even the most minute aspect of your report
before you view it using one of the aforementioned viewers. Using the Report Engine, you can control
the report’s formatting and features, set database credentials, and call direct methods to print, export,
and so on.
To get an idea of the types of reports that can be created using Crystal Reports, check
out the sample reports available from the Crystal Decisions Web site at http://
community.crystaldecisions.com/fix/samplescr.asp.
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