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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-11T00:26:57+00:00

Here’s the scenario: I’m working with a database table that stores an XML string

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Here’s the scenario:

I’m working with a database table that stores an XML string in one of its columns. This XML contains important data that I am working on generating reports on using Crystal Reports. To do this I have created an object to represent the relevant data from the XML string and bound a list of these objects to my report viewer. I’ve done a bit of work with the Crystal Reports setting up filtering and sorting using their native controls but this is turning out to not be verbose enough to handle the kind of filtering I want to be capable of.

I would like to have some kind of UI control that would allow a user to build expressions which can be used to filter my list of objects. The list can then be programmatically bound to the reports viewer with the relevant objects.

For clarification an example of something I would like to do. Have the user be able to select all transactions for a given product that happened between 9 – 10 AND 12 – 2 OR 4- 5. Basically to be given querying control using logical operations for any of the properties in my object.

Any thoughts or suggestions on how to accomplish this? Was wondering if anyone knew of any tools that contained this kind of functionality.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Text-based queries are rarely used in good user experiences. They are more often used for one software to talk to another in both a human-readable and machine-readable way.

    You are probably better off making a UI to build the queries for you. For example, you could create a class to represent the type of constraint, and maintain a list of constraints for each query in a ListBox. Then the user can add and remove a constraint from the list of constraints as desired. You would bind the selected item of the ListBox to a constraint builder control where they could pick the type of constraint (string matches, date range, etc.)

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