Gregory Rubinstein
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OOP Primer
Definition:
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Passing Parameter to Crystal Report
Recently, I was developing a pretty sophisticated Crystal Report that included multiple sub-reports and used multiple stored procedures as data sources. All of those stored procedures accepted the same parameter, which made my life a little easier, since I only had to deal with one parameter that I needed to pass to my Crystal Report.
In order for all sub-reports to be able to recognize the parameter, which I am passing to the main report, I had to link all of my sub-reports to the main report using that parameter.
In order to link a sub-report to the main report, the following actions should be performed:
To link a subreport to the data in the primary report -
Converting ASP.NET to PDF
I probably wouldn't be wrong if I said that most developers every now and then are tasked to present specific data contained in a webpage as a PDF document. There are two ways to do it:
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Crystal Reports with ASP.NET
When it comes to developing a report for an ASP.NET application, one might find that there is very little information available on how it's done using Crystal Reports.
Visual Studio 2003 comes with a built-in version of Crystal Reports (CR 9). Using that built-in version of Crystal Reports might save you some money, since it's a part of VS 2003, however, from the Crystal Reports design prospective it is much more convenient to use a stand-alone version of Crystal Reports.
The latest version of Crystal Reports at the time of writing this post is Crystal Reports XI, which provides some new features, not available in previous versions (see the www.businessobjects.com website for more info), so in my last development I used that version of Crystal Reports.
In order for the report to display as a webpage, VS 2003 provides CrystalReportViewer control. This is how it works:
Instantiate the DataSet object
Dim ds As New DataSet
ds = GetDataForReport() 'some method that retrieves data for the report
Instantiate the ReportDocument object:
Dim rpt As New ReportDocument
'set the ReportObject as the report you want to display
rpt = New CrystalReport1
'Define the datasource of your report
rpt.SetDataSource(ds)
'define your report as a reportsource for the crystalreportviewer
CrystalReportViewer1.ReportSource = rpt
Below is C# version of this code:
DataSet ds = new DataSet();
ReportDocument rpt = new ReportDocument();
rpt = new CrystalReport1();
rpt.SetDataSource(ds);
CrystalReportViewer1.ReportSource = rpt;
In order for this code to work, the following namespaces must be imported/used:
CrystalDecisions.CrystalReports.Engine
CrystalDecisions.Shared
CrystalDecisions.Web.Design
The following namespaces should be used only if you are planning to convert the report into a PDF, Word, or Excel format.
CrystalDecisions.Shared.ExportDestinationType
CrystalDecisions.Shared.ExportFormatType
CrystalDecisions.Shared.ExportDestinationOptions -
Remaining Characters Counter
Recently I was developing a webform (asp.net) where the user could submit his feedback, and one of the requirements was that the user should not enter more than a set number of characters in his message, so I thought it would be real nice for the end user to know how many more characters he still can type until the maximum limit is reached.
In order to allow that functionality, I created a asp.net multiline textbox for text input and an html readonly text field (for displaying number of characters until the maximum).
Then, I created a Javascript function and called it every time the contents of the multiline textbox changed (onKeyUp and onChange events).
Below is the code:
<html>
<head>
<script language="JavaScript"> -
Active Control Marker
Today, while working on my project, I recalled that some of the data entry pages in my project have a lot of textboxes, which may confuse the end-user once he starts entering information. My idea was to make the textbox that has focus visually different from the rest, so I came up with the following code snippet, that does the actual work: