Crystal Reports |Crystal Reports is the standard reporting tool for Visual Studio . NET used to display data of presentation quality. You can display | | |multiple-level totals, charts to analyze data, and much more in Crystal Reports. Creating a Crystal Report requires minimal coding since it| | |is created in Designer interface. It is available as an integrated feature of Microsoft Visual Studio .
NET. | | With Crystal Reports for Visual Basic. NET, you can host reports on Web and Windows platforms and publish Crystal reports as Report Web Services on a Web server.To present data to users, you could write code to loop through recordsets and print them inside your Windows or Web application. However, any work beyond basic formatting can be complicated: consolidations, multiple level totals, charting, and conditional formatting are difficult to program.
With Crystal Reports for Visual Studio . NET, you can quickly create complex and professional-looking reports. Instead of coding, you use the Crystal Report Designer interface to create and format the report you need.The powerful Report Engine processes the formatting, grouping, and charting criteria you specify.
Report Experts Using the Crystal Report Experts, you can quickly create reports based on your development needs: • Choose from report layout options ranging from standard reports to form letters, or build your own report from scratch. • Display charts that users can drill down on to view detailed report data. • Calculate summaries, subtotals, and percentages on grouped data. • Show TopN or BottomN results of data.
Conditionally format text and rotate text objects. Advantages of Crystal Reports Some of the major advantages of using Crystal Reports are: 1. Rapid report development since the designer interface would ease the coding work for the programmer. 2. Can extend it to complicated reports with interactive charts and enhance the understanding of the business model 3. Exposes a report object model, can interact with other controls on the ASP.
NET Web form 4. Can programmatically export the reports into widely used formats like . df, . doc, .
xls, . html and . rtf Implementation Models Crystal Reports need database drivers to connect to the data source for accessing data. Crystal Reports in . net support two methods to access data from a data source.
The Pull Method When this model is used to access data from the data source, the database driver directly retrieves the data from the data source. This model does not require the developer to write code for creating a connection and retrieving data from the data source.It is the Crystal report that manages the SQL commands for connecting by using the specified driver. [pic] The Push Method When this model is used to access data from data source, the developer writes the code to connect to the data source and retrieve data. The data from the data source is cached in dataset and multiple crystal reports accesses data from the dataset.
The performance can be optimized in this manner by using connection sharing and manually limiting the number of records that are passed on to the report. [pic]
