VB.NET + Crystal Report = True?

Question

I'm making a VB.NET application that needs to generate a number of different reports. The customer is already using Crystal Report and is happy with that so the plan is to integrate with that.

What I basically want to do is:

• Manually create template(s) in crystal report
• User selects type of report in application
• User filters the data according to his wishes
• Crystal Report is opened with the relevant template and values from the application inserted
• User can then review the data, create PDFs and print the reports.

My questions are:

• Is this doable at all in a simple way(quite a low budget project)? Are there any good tutorials?
• I don't want Crystal Report to communicate directly with the database but a number of calculations needs to be done in the VB.NET code. Do I need to prepare the data in some special way?
• Can I include the Crystal Report templates inside the application and extract them when the report needs to be created?

Answer 1

Visual Studio does come with Crystal Reports functionality "in the box" (and has done since Visual Studio.Net) - you can use that to create your Crystal Reports, which by default will be embedded as a resource, if included in a project. It is possible also to load external files as well, though.

It's probably worth taking a look at the samples that use the Crystal Report viewer, as they will show that most of what you're asking is covered...

Answer 2

I wrote a little post about VB.NET + CR some time ago. It's not specially brilliant but maybe it can help you in some way. This is the link. I'm sorry about the ugly code format but hope it'll be useful.