Crystal and VS 2005 / 2008

[gav12345]

Hi all,

I have a couple of general questions about Crystal in Visual Studio 2005 and 2008. Essentially we have just finished phase 1 of a project which has ended up with about 150 Crystal 10 reports, all very similar to each other.

So...for phase 2 we thought that it might be much easier to create 5 or 10 basic (template) reports, and then integrate these into VS 2005 and make any required modifications programatically at runtime.

The sorts of things we'd want to do is modify the contents of formula fields, modify the size of cells within Crosstab objects, change page margins, change font sizes etc.

Basically, we would need a fair degree of flexibility. Are the CrystalReportViewer / ReportDocument object models powerful enough to do this sort of thing, or are we going to be creating a lot of uneccessary work for ourselves?

Thanks in advance for any input.

Gavin

 

[MJRBIM]

This is a pretty ugly way to manage reports - ripping the reports apart and reformatting at runtime can really hit performance.

With that proviso - I have seen it done just like that (**while covering my face in anguish) on a number of .NET projects using the Report Application Server (RAS) options in the Crystal SDK.



Senior Business Intelligence Consultant
Toronto, Canada

SeagateInfo 7 -> Crystal Enterprise -> BOE-XI (R2) / (R3.1) | Crystal ( 7 -> 2008) design | WebI design | Best practices for Java / .Net / Web Services