Composite reporting, Crystal Reports difficult to manage

Question

I was wondering if someone had a suggestion on how to best do composite reporting. I have tried to accomplish this with Crystal Reports [CR] (The one that comes with VS2k8) but for a codemonkey like me, it's hard to grasp the design part...

I have found that CR works nicely for reporting on tabular and repeatable data, but I can't grasp how to do what I want it to do.

What I want is a nice front-page, with title, subtitle and possibly some other text. Maybe a TOC. A summary report, consisting of some calculations and text-summaries calculated beforehand (not using the reporting tool). Then a listing of one type of data, normal tabular. Then another type of data, also tabular. Then a drill-down on the first type of data. (Every "line" in the first type has 1..* associated items).

It looks to me like I have to do them all in separate reports, then "concatenate" the resulting reports to one another to get one report. And the front-page and the summary page I have no idea how to do at all.

Is there a better tool for doing this? Or does anyone have a good "quick-start" on composite reporting with CR? :)

EDIT: Oh, and these will only be used in printed-form. So no dynamic drill-down and such are necessary.

Answer 1

I create sub-reports and insert them into a footer section of the main report to create composite reports, using seperate reports as you suggest. I've searched myself, and failed to find any reasonable alternative. This approach works well enough and results in a single report file when done.

Answer 2

In my experience, Crystal is a pain in the butt for doing anything like a fixed page layout (ie: the title page). I usually put the title page in the report header (make sure to select "new page after" in the section options). Everything else pretty much has to go into subreports.

If you need to share totals and such between subreports, you need to use a shared variable in a formula field:

shared numbervar whateverTotal:= sum({whatever});

and then in the following reports, just use:

shared numbervar whateverTotal;

Answer 3

If your looking for alternatives to Crystal take a look at this site. http://blogs.windwardreports.com/matta/