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What Can You Do with Crystal Reports.NET?
To start with, Crystal Reports.NET includes an integrated Report Designer available within the Visual Studio IDE that you can use to create report files (.rpt) to integrate with your application.
This Report Designer (covered in Chapter 2) features a number of "experts" (or wizards) to help you get started creating a report and 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 or you want to compile statistics for a management report or 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.
Important
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.
After you have created a report, you need some way to display this report from your application, and Crystal Reports.NET has two different viewers to make this happen. The Windows Forms Viewer (which we look at in Chapter 3) can be used with windows applications to preview any reports you have integrated into your application and 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 and either have it as the sole content of the form, or place it alongside other 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.
For web-based application, there is also a Web Forms Viewer (Chapter 4) 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, or in a frameset, or side by side with other application content - it is up to you.
For complete control over your report, regardless of whether your are viewing it through the Windows or Web Forms Viewers, you also have access to the Report Engine (see Chapter 8), which 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.For creating distributed applications, Crystal Reports.NET has a number of features specifically designed for creating and consuming XML Report Web Services, either through a generic Web Service that ships with Crystal Reports.NET (which allows you to utilize a report without having to publish it as a Web Service) or by creating your own Web Services from report files. (In any case, Chapter 5 will guide you through the process of both creating and consuming XML Report Web Services.)
Finally, Crystal Reports.NET is also tightly integrated with Crystal Enterprise, a report scheduling and distribution system that provides a true multi-tier back-end processing platform for reports and allows you to use a scheduling engine and distribution framework to distribute reports to thousands of users.
If that wasn't enough functionality jam-packed into this release, there are also a number of tools included for distributing reports with your application that are covered in Chapter 9.
