I’m making a VB.NET application that needs to generate a number of different reports. The customer is already using Crystal Report and is happy with that so the plan is to integrate with that.
What I basically want to do is:
- Manually create template(s) in
crystal report - User selects type of report in
application - User filters the data according to
his wishes - Crystal Report is opened with the
relevant template and values from the
application inserted - User can then review the data, create
PDFs and print the reports.
My questions are:
- Is this doable at all in a simple
way(quite a low budget project)? Are
there any good tutorials? - I don’t want Crystal Report to
communicate directly with the
database but a number of calculations
needs to be done in the VB.NET code.
Do I need to prepare the data in some
special way? - Can I include the Crystal Report
templates inside the application and
extract them when the report needs to
be created?
Visual Studio does come with Crystal Reports functionality “in the box” (and has done since Visual Studio.Net) – you can use that to create your Crystal Reports, which by default will be embedded as a resource, if included in a project. It is possible also to load external files as well, though.
It’s probably worth taking a look at the samples that use the Crystal Report viewer, as they will show that most of what you’re asking is covered…