what is crystal reports?
Crystal Reports is a business intelligence application used to design and generate reports from a wide range of data sources. Several other applications, including Microsoft Visual Studio, at one time bundled an OEM version of Crystal Reports as a general purpose reporting tool. Crystal Reports is a popular report writer, especially when Microsoft bundled it with Visual Studio versions 2003 through 2008. Microsoft discontinued this practice and later released their own competitive reporting tool, SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS). Crystal Reports for Visual Studio 2010 is still available as add-on software.
NOTE:
'It turns out that Crystal Reports for Visual Studio 2010 will be released separately, instead of included with the product and Most importantly, Crystal Reports for Visual Studio 2010 will continue to be free, with no registration required.'
Download Crystal report from this link or just directly paste the link below to your address bar and it will ask to save an EXE file.
http://downloads.businessobjects.com/akdlm/cr4vs2010/CRforVS_13_0.exe
Crystal Reports has been part of Visual Studio since 1993, and is now the standard for reporting in Visual Studio 2005. It ships with every copy of Visual Studio 2005 and is integrated directly into the development environment.
Crystal Reports for Visual Studio 2005 brings the ability to create interactive, presentation-quality content to the Windows environment. With Crystal Reports for Visual Studio 2005, you can create complex and professional reports in a GUI-based program. Then you can connect your report to almost any database source, as well as to proxy data, such as a result set (for example, an ADO.NET DataSet). With the wizards included in the GUI designer, you can easily set formatting, grouping, charting, and other criteria.
You can host your report in either a Web or Windows application, with one of the Crystal Reports for Visual Studio 2005 viewer controls. Report presentation in both Windows and HTML 3.2 or 4.0 clients is highly interactive and provides you with features such as chart drill down, report navigation, and text search.
Crystal Reports for Visual Studio 2005 ships with an extensive SDK.
You can use the SDK to interact with the report programmatically at runtime, by use of one of four possible object models:
- CrystalReportViewer, the simplest object model.
- ReportDocument, the more extensive object model.
- ReportClientDocument, the most extensive object model.
- InfoObject, a powerful object model for scheduling and configuring reports within the Crystal Reports Server or BusinessObjects Enterprise framework.
Note The ReportClientDocument object model and InfoObject object model are part of the Report Application Server (RAS). These solutions require upgraded licensing. See Upgrade Options.
Your reports can be related to your Visual Studio 2005 project in many ways:
- Embed your reports directly into the project.
- Access them externally, from a file directory.
- Access them as a Report Web Service from a remote server.
- Connect to them as Crystal Services.
- With an upgrade to Crystal Reports Server you can access them through the RAS Server.
- With an upgrade to BusinessObjects Enterprise, you can access them through the Page server or the RAS server contained within the BusinessObjects Enterprise framework.
- You can access them through a legacy enterprise solution, such as Crystal Enterprise or an unmanaged RAS server.
An Example
Here is an example of how reports might operate within a Visual Studio 2005 project:
Crystal Reports is used to design a report that enables users to drill down on a chart and filter information, in accordance with their needs. That report has been included in an ASP.NET project, and then displayed in a Web Form with a CrystalReportViewer control that is bound to that report. The report can be interacted with by use of the ReportDocument object model.
Features
Report designer
Crystal Reports allows users to graphically design data connection(s) and report layout. In the Database Expert, users can select and link tables from a wide variety of data sources, including Microsoft Excel spreadsheets, Oracle databases, Microsoft SQL Server databases, Microsoft Access databases, Business Objects Enterprise business views, and local file system information. Fields from these tables can be placed on the report design surface, and can also be used in custom formulas, using either BASIC or Crystal's own syntax, which are then placed on the design surface. Formulas can be evaluated at several phases during report generation as specified by the developer.
Both fields and formulas have a wide array of formatting options available, which can be applied absolutely or conditionally. The data can be grouped into bands, each of which can be split further and conditionally suppressed as needed. Crystal Reports also supports subreports, graphing, and a limited amount of GIS functionality.
Target audience
Crystal Reports came integrated with Visual Studio versions prior to 2010. Crystal Reports competes with several products in the Microsoft market, such as SQL Server Reporting Services, XtraReports, ActiveReports and List & Label. Crystal Reports is also accessible outside of the Microsoft market, for instance allowing Java developers to build applications with Crystal Reports components.
0 comments:
Post a Comment
Thank you for your valuable comments..