Visual Basic.NET How to Program (PDF)

1468 Crystal Reports® for Visual Studio .NET Appendix N
Fig. N.2 Expert formatting menu choices. (Courtesy of Crystal Decisions)
The Crystal Reports software for Visual Studio .NET is comprised of several components.
Once a report is set up, either manually or by using an Expert, developers use the
Crystal Reports Designer in Visual Studio .NET to modify, add and format objects and
fields, as well as to format the report layout and manipulate the report design (Fig. N.3).
The Designer then generates RPT files (.rpt is the file extension for a Crystal Report).
These RPT files are processed by the Crystal Reports engine, which delivers the report
output to one of two Crystal Report viewers—a Windows Forms viewer control or a Web
Forms viewer control, depending on the type of application the developer specifies. The
viewers then present the formatted information to the user.
Walkthroughs illustrating the new functionality are available on the Crystal Decisions
Web site at www.crystaldecisions.com/x-jump/scr_net/default.asp.
The walkthroughs include integrating and viewing Web reports through Windows applications,
creating interactive reports in Web applications, exposing Crystal Reports through
Web services and reporting from ActiveX Data Objects (ADO) .NET data. 2 (For a detailed
discussion of ADO .NET and other database tools, see Chapter 19, Databases, SQL and
ADO .NET.) This section overviews the functionality of some of the Web applications and
Web services walkthroughs.
2. The walkthroughs on the Crystal Decisions Web site were tested using C# in Visual Studio .NET,
but a developer should be able to use the walkthroughs with any language supported by Visual Studio
.NET.