Anyone Know a good tutorial of how Crystal Reports for Visual Studio works?

Question

I am stuck building reports that will be generated by a custom application using the Crystal Reports 9.1.5 that comes with Visual Studio 2003. In addition to the editor being one of the most infuriating things I've ever had to work with I am also constantly hounded by the various gotchas having to do with their code generation engine.

Does anyone know of the existence of some sort of tutorial that will explain to me how all this works so it doesn't feel so much like I'm groping around in the dark?

Answer 1

i know of no tutorial, sorry

but i can definitely recommend using datasets as your data source, never a direct connection

and expect to write the same stupid little formatting expressions over and over and over and over...

Answer 2

Not sure why you're stuck with that version of CR. If you can at all upgrade to at least CR XI developer edition, you'll be better off. Integrating them into your VS projects is a bit kludgy, but you can try this blog for starters: http://weblogs.asp.net/jgaylord/archive/2007/01/24/crystal-reports-merge-modules.aspx