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