Creating your First Crystal Report for Use in a .NET Application

Introduction

Reports are a mere after thought on many projects. A great deal of effort is put into creating forms to manipulate the customer’s data, but many developers and project managers wait until the last minute to create reports. At this point in many projects, the budget is nearly gone, and project stakeholders are looking for something that may not be delivererable within the current budget constraints.  When the time comes, that a customer asks for a great deal of data to be formatted in a specific way, with multiple search criteria selected, developers are often times left scrambling to develop a solution to fit within their budget.

Depending upon the complexity of the data to be rendered, some developers decide to present the data to their users using the same technologies that their application was create created with (ASP, Win Forms, WPF, etc.) instead of a reporting package such as Crystal Reports. Many believe because that budget constraints mean that they do not have time to learn a new tool or purchase reporting tools. In simple situations, this option may be viable, but when your reports start to become more complex, using libraries that are created specifically for report writing will make life much easier. This is where Crystal Reports comes in.

Crystal Report Files

Let us first begin by discussing report files. Each reporting package handles the report files slightly differently, but underlying concepts are the same. With Crystal Reports, the report files are .RPT files. The .RPT files are created using the Crystal Reports Designer, which is available as a stand-alone program, or an add-in to Visual Studio. Many versions of Visual Studio ship with a version of the Crystal Reports designer add-in, meaning you can create Crystal Reports within Visual Studio without having to buy additional software or licenses. The Crystal Reports Designer add-In for Visual Studio is a good tool, but the stand-alone Crystal Reports designer has additional features that make report creation much easier. Examples in this article will use the stand-alone Crystal Reports designer, but all of the features discussed are available in the Visual Studio add-in as well.  

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