Appendix B: Migrating Applications to Crystal Reports.NET

Overview

One of the most common situations that a developer will face, at least with regard to Visual Basic or Active Server Pages programming and the .NET Framework, is the conversion of Crystal Reports into the new Crystal Reports.NET format and design in Visual Studio .NET. While this is a fairly simple operation in general, there is a path to follow, and several pitfalls wait to ensnare the unwary. If you have looked at Appendix A then you will already be aware of most of these, but if not, don't worry, we'll cover all of this and the following in this short appendix:

An example of using a Crystal 8.5 report in Visual Studio .NET

Migrating a VB6 application with Crystal 8.5 to Visual Basic .NET using the Upgrade Wizard

This doesn't seem like much, but it covers the two most common conversion efforts for VB programmers. Most likely, we'll be engineering a new application using existing reports. This is fairly easy, because unless the report uses a feature not supported in Crystal Reports.NET, we only have the data pipeline to worry about.

The second case is more hairy, however, because VB code will have to change. We'll take a simple application and see what the Upgrade Wizard does to the code.

On a personal note, I began this appendix with the commonly held proposition that the problems would be in the areas of data access methods. After fighting the good fight over and over, I discovered that this is not the case - actually, as we'll see, the example converted with the minimum of changes to the report. In fact, only a change in attitude by the programmer is necessary. Visual Basic .NET is an object-oriented language, and now the report files are treated as objects. The data access methods, however, are pretty much the same, provided we don't let Visual Studio .NET change the report to a Crystal Reports.NET format.