Gregory Rubinstein

Crystal Reports with ASP.NET

2008-05-10T02:28:00Z

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

Converting ASP.NET to PDF

2008-05-10T02:21:00Z

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:

using the functionality of CrystalReportViewer's toolbar - this toolbar provides a button, which does exactly that. However, to use this approach you would have to actually display the crystal report on the page.

programmatically convert the Crystal Report object into a PDF document using the Crystal Reports API

Below is the code for the second approach:

Dim report As CrystalReport1 = New CrystalReport1
SqlDataAdapter1.Fill(DataSet11)
report.SetDataSource(DataSet11)
report.ExportToHttpResponse (ExportFormatType.PortableDocFormat, Response, False, "ExportedReport")

Remaining Characters Counter

2008-04-11T02:06:00Z

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">

function CountChars(text,long)

{
   var maxlength = new Number(long);
   var myLength = text.value.length;
   document.forms[0].Counter.value = maxlength - myLength;
   if (myLength > maxlength) {
      text.value = text.value.substring(0,maxlength);
   }
}

</script>

</head>
<body>

<form id="Form1" runat="server">

<asp:Textbox mode="multiline" id="txtMessage" runat="server" /><br />

<input type="text" name="Counter" readonly="readonly" />

</form>

</body>
</html>

Protected Sub Page_Load(ByVal sender As Object, ByVal e As System.EventArgs) Handles Me.Load
    Util.SetTextBoxProperties(txtMessage, True)
End Sub

Below is the SetTextBoxProperties method, which actually did the work:

Public Sub SetTextBoxProperties(ByVal txt As TextBox)
    txt.Attributes.Add("onKeyUp", "CountChars(this," & txt.MaxLength & ")")
    txt.Attributes.Add("onChange", "CountChars(this," & txt.MaxLength & ")")
End Sub

Active Control Marker

2008-04-10T04:07:00Z

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:

Public Sub ShowActiveTextbox(ByVal txt As TextBox)

txt.Attributes.Add("onfocus", "this.className='class1'")
txt.Attributes.Add("onblur", "this.className='class2'")

End Sub

This code would work just fine if I had only one or two Textboxes on my page. However, some of the pages may contain a dozen of those textboxes, so I came up with another useful method:

Public Sub ShowActiveTextbox(ByVal col As ControlCollection)

For Each Ctl As Control In col

If Ctl.GetType().Name = "Textbox" Then

Call ShowActiveTextbox(Ctl)

Else

'Handle TextBoxes contained in container controls, such as panel
If ctl.Controls.Count > 0 Then

Call ShowActiveTextBox(ctl.Controls)

End If

Next
End Sub

Now we have a method that will handle any number of controls on a specific page and will apply the onFocus and onBlur event handlers to all Textboxes on that page.