Can I make a report for a stored procedure with unknown amount of columns?

Question

I have a stored procedure, that generates some columns dynamically. I want to use Crystal Reports as a reporting service and, in particular, I need to generate report from this stored proc data. It's a poll-result report and for each poll act there is a row with it's ID and answers to the questions(one column for each question with questions IDs as headers). Customer has different forms with different number of questions, so number of columns is unknown for a common report.

---

So, the questions are:

1. Can I make the report view all columns from the returned dataset?
2. (If not,) Can I add fields to a existing report during runtime?
3. (If not,) Do you know any reporting services that can do such a thing? :)

P. S.: I know that the report design is really weird and this problem should not exist at all, but this is one of customer's demands...

Answer 1

The only way that I am aware of creaing n column reports is by using a Crystal Cros Tab Report (or Pivot Report)

Have a look at

• Cross Tab Craziness in Crystal Reports
• Creating a Crosstab Report in Visual Studio 2005 Using Crystal Reports

Answer 2

1 - No

2 - Crystal does have a report creation/modification api, but you need a license to their report server product to use it - it is not available to the built-in Crystal in Visual Studio, and I don't think you can use it in production if you have a desktop Crystal license - you would have to check with them for licensing details

3 - There are several of asp.net reporting components available which may allow you to do this (Telerik has one, and I know there are a couple of others) assuming your are using asp.net - otherwise, I don't know.

Could you just create separate-but-equal reports for the various survey flavors you have to deal with?