Hi all,
I am after creating a custom report generator within my VB.Net 2005 application. It would need to pull information out of a SQL database and allow users to design custom forms in a similar way to the Microsoft Access Report Generator. I am considering using Crystal Reports for this but I have never used Crystal Reports before.
Can someone with a bit more experience let me know if I am heading down the right track.
Thanks
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Agree. You cannot do it with the version of Crystal that comes with Visual Studio.
I believe it is possible with the stand-alone version using the royalty-requried dll CRAXDDRT. I have never done this but I believe you can provide a basic capability to drag and drop fields. It will cost you for a licesnse for each user of your application. Last time I checked it was $199 (US) for each license.
mlmcc
I believe mlmcc is correct about the royalty-required dll but from a cost basis, the Crystal solution is quite expensive unless you're only going to deploy to 1 or 2 users. By contrast you can buy the Telerik tool for $399 and distribute your application without limitation.
Don't mistake, I love using Crystal for a reporting tool, it just isn't the best suited tool for user-created dynamic reporting.
frodoman
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by: frodomanPosted on 2007-09-14 at 09:26:51ID: 19892936
You aren't going to be able to build a solution like MS Access report generator because you can't build the crystal reports dynamically. The closest you can get to with Crystal is to predefine a report based on a generic dataset with a fixed format and then within your application you fill the dataset based on the user's choices and send the dataset to the report.
The limitations however are that you're tied to the initial report. If you define it with 10 text fields then you will always need to send 10 text fields in the dataset (even if you only need 3, you'll have to send blanks which will still appear on the report). You can get creative and conditionally suppress fields based on the value but the layout of the report won't change.
If you want to truly build dynamic reports you'll have better luck with a .net reporting component. I personally have found the Telerik reporting object to be the most powerful when used with .Net 2.0 but it has a fairly steep learning curve.
hth
frodoman