Crystal Reports for Visual Studio.

NET is a great tool for creating professional-looking

reports in the .NET platform. This tool allows you to host your reports in a Windows
Application, in a Web Application, and to publish reports like Web Services. It has a
rich programming model. It was built using the framework of Crystal Reports 8.0, but
has been modified for the .NET platform to give us the richest API possible and has
open and flexible architecture to allow you to share reports on the Web.

Using Crystal Reports for Visual Studio .NET, you can create very complex reports.
The Crystal Report Designer allows you to create and format the report you need
without coding. The Report Engine processes all the formatting, grouping, and
charting criteria that you specify when you design the report.

If you use Crystal Report Experts, you can choose from report layout options ranging
from standard reports to form letters, or you can build your own report from scratch.
You can display charts that users can drill down on to view detailed report data,
calculate summaries and subtotals, format text or rotate text objects, and so on.

Let's see how you can create a report using Crystal Reports and publish it on a Web
page. We are going to use Pubs database from SQL Server for data source of our
report.

When you create a report, you specify the data source of the report, design the report
layout, and finally you have to decide how you want users to access the report data.
Now, it's time to try to use Crystal Reports for Visual Studio.NET.

First, start Visual Studio.NET and create ASP.NET Application project. In the Solution
Window, right click on project name and select "Add New Item" option.
On the AddNewItem window in the templates pane, look for the icon that represent
Crystal Reports. Click on it, and click on Open button.
In the Crystal Reports gallery dialog click on the OK button to move to the Standard
Report Expert window. In this window expand "OLE DB (ADO)" option, which will open
the OLE DB (ADO) window. Select "Microsoft OLD DB Provider for SQL Server" from
list of available providers, because we are going to use MS SQL Server and Pubs
database that is installed by default when you first install your SQL Server, and click
the "NEXT" button.
On next connection window, enter information about your SQL Server:

• Server: localhost
• User ID: sa (in your case maybe something else)
• Password: test (in your case maybe something else)
• Database: pubs

and click on the "FINISH" button.

From the Pubs connection, select three tables: Authors, Titles, and TitleAuthor. Click
on the "NEXT" button, and skip the link part because Crystal Reports will correct link
tables by clicking on "NEXT" button. From Available Fields, from Title table select Title
and Price fields, and from Authors table select au_fname and au_lname fields. At this
point just click on the "FINISH" button. Crystal Reports will generate the report. Note
that in this case we were using a "Pull" model to access data. Crystal Reports can use
two different models to access data "Pull" and "Push" models. In the "Pull" model the
database driver will connect to the database and will pull data. In the "Push" model,
the developer must write code to connect to the database, to create recordset and to
pass that object to the report.

In the next picture you can see the report that Crystal Reports created for us. Save
the report and go back to the Web Form.
To include the report on the Web page, we need to drag and drop the Crystal Report
Viewer control from the Toolbox. Because the Crystal Report Viewer control doesn't
have a ReportSource property available at design time, you have to set that property
inside your code.

Imports CrystalDecisions.CrystalReports.Engine
Imports CrystalDecisions.Shared
Public Class WebForm1
Inherits System.Web.UI.Page
Protected WithEvents CrystalReportViewer1 As
CrystalDecisions.Web.CrystalReportViewer
#Region " Windows Form Designer generated code "

Private Sub Page_Load(ByVal sender As System.Object, ByVal e As

System.EventArgs) Handles MyBase.Load
CrystalReportViewer1.ReportSource = Server.MapPath("crystalreport1.rpt")

End Sub

End Class.

or you can create instance of the report class which was created by Visual Studio.NET
when you designed your report. The name of that file is same as report that you
create CrystalReport1.vb. To see this file expand CrystalReport1.rpt (click on + sign in
front of the CrystalReport1.rpt).

Imports CrystalDecisions.CrystalReports.Engine
Imports CrystalDecisions.Shared
Public Class WebForm1
Inherits System.Web.UI.Page
Protected WithEvents CrystalReportViewer1 As
CrystalDecisions.Web.CrystalReportViewer
#Region " Windows Form Designer generated code "

Dim crpt As CrystalReport1

Private Sub Page_Load(ByVal sender As System.Object, ByVal e As
System.EventArgs) Handles MyBase.Load
crpt = New CrystalReport1()
CrystalReportViewer1.ReportSource = crpt
End Sub

End Class.

If you set WebForm1.aspx to be the Start Up page for the project, and start the
project, you will get the report page if you have blank password in database for "sa".
If "sa" or any other user name that you want to use to access database has
password, when you run the report, you will see the "LogonFailed" error. If we were
developing windows application, Crystal Reports will ask us for password information.
This error occured, because when you design and save report, all of the connection
information is saved within the report except password. If the password is blank,
there will be no problem to create or generate the report.
To prevent this, you will need to provide login information in your code before you set
ReportSource property. To do so, you will add some code in Page_Load event. Now,
your code should look like:

Imports CrystalDecisions.CrystalReports.Engine
Imports CrystalDecisions.Shared
Public Class WebForm1
Inherits System.Web.UI.Page
Protected WithEvents CrystalReportViewer1 As
CrystalDecisions.Web.CrystalReportViewer
#Region " Windows Form Designer generated code "

Dim crpt As CrystalReport1

Dim myTable As CrystalDecisions.CrystalReports.Engine.Table
Dim myLogin As CrystalDecisions.Shared.TableLogOnInfo
Private Sub Page_Load(ByVal sender As System.Object, ByVal e As
System.EventArgs) Handles MyBase.Load
crpt = New CrystalReport1()

For Each myTable In crpt.Database.Tables

myLogin = myTable.LogOnInfo
myLogin.ConnectionInfo.Password = "test"
myLogin.ConnectionInfo.UserID = "sa"
myTable.ApplyLogOnInfo(myLogin)
Next
 CrystalReportViewer1.ReportSource = crpt
End Sub

End Class.

Now, if you run the report, you will not get an error page and evrything will look OK.
The report will be generated and shown in your Web page.

Summary

• Now we can say that we know the answer to the question above. Logon failed,
because in the designer Crystal Reports maintains connection information, but
when you save the report and later on try to use same report, an error will be
thrown because of missing password information. This is logical, because
nobody wants password information to be saved within reports, and this
 required password information to be submited to the Crystal Reports engine
before you try to open the report.
• Crystal Reports is a very powerful tool and can help you create professional-
looking reports. It will allow you to even publish your report as a Web Service.
• When you are accessing the database, you will need to provide the connection
information for each table in your report. ConnectionInfo object has several
properties that you can setup at runtime before you setting ReportSource
property of the Crystal Report Viewer object. You can set a new database
name, new user, new password, or even new server that is different that one
that was setup when the report was designed. This will give you a lot of
flexibility.

In my next articles, I will try to show you how to host a report in a Windows
Applications, how to host a report in a Web Application (caching, how to incorporate
reports as untyped report components in Web and Windows projects alike, how to
incorporate reports as strongly-typed report components in Web projects, etc.),
publish a report as a Web Service, how to export a report in other formats (like HTML,
PDF, RTF, Excel, or Word), how to optimize Report Performance, how Crystal
Enterprise can help extend the scalability and the speed of Web-based reports.