- Shourie

3 Basic Questions What How

Why

Crystal Reports is a business intelligence application for designing and generating reports from a wide range of data sources.

Due to lack of good report writers for their accounting software Crystal Services came up with Crystal Reports.

Later acquired by SAP.Crystal Reports has been part of Visual

Studio since 1993 and now a standard for reporting in Visual Studio 2005.

To create interactive reports that can be integrated into wide range of windows and web applications

To turn data into actionable reportsHas comprehensive tools that can be used to

produce complex or specialized reports in c# and other programming languages.

Rapid report development Can extend it to complicated reports with

interactive charts and enhance the understanding of the business model

Exposes a report object model, can interact with other controls on the ASP.NET Web form

Can programmatically export the reports into widely used formats like .pdf, .doc, .xls, .html and .rtf

Data present to users via Crystal Reports is way beyond the basic formatting.

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.

Crystal Reports in .net support two methods to access data from a data source:

1) Pull Method2) Push Method

There are 2 types of crystal reports that can be generated

1) Strongly Typed Report2) Un-Typed Report

3 methods to create crystal reports1) Manually i.e. from a blank document2) Using Standard Report Expert3) From an existing report

1. Create the .rpt file (from scratch) and set the necessary database connections using the Crystal Report Designer interface.

2. Place a CrystalReportViewer control from the toolbox on the .aspx page and set its properties to point to the .rpt file that we created in the previous step.

3. Call the databind method from your code behind page.

You can opt to export your report file into one of the following formats:

1) PDF (Portable Document Format)2)DOC (MS Word Document)3)XLS (MS Excel Spreadsheet)4)HTML (Hyper Text Markup

Language ) 5)RTF (Rich Text Format)To accomplish this you could place a button

on your page to trigger the export functionality.

Stimulsoft reports is one of the alternatives to Crystal Reports ,especially when working with complex reports.

Stimulsoft is much easier to use but also easier to deploy with applications as we need to deploy only one more .NET assembly, written in C#. In some areas (designer, working with different data sources, subreports) it is even better than Crystal.