How to use crystal reports in vs 2008

Question

I'm a beginner at this. I'm using mysql connector .net to connect vb.net with mysql database. But I used ODBC for a crystal report. Is that ok?

And I'm also putting a command, will something like the one below work?

And how do I designed a crystal report? My first try, I got a lame report with only text on it.

Please give links that could help a beginner like me to get the hang on using crystal reports. I'm using vs 2008

Answer 1

Sounds like you're off to a good start. Like any other software tool, the best way to learn about Crystal is to use it, make mistakes, and learn from your mistakes. Also like any other software tool, it has limitations and advantages. Here's a few things for you to try out:

1. You should familiarize yourself with the concept of "sections", i.e. Report Header & Footer, Group Header & Footer, Page Header & Footer, and the Details. Your base data should be in the Details section with summaries in the headers & footers. You can also suppress sections if you don't need them.

2. "Grouping" is the concept of grouping... your hospital patients by the doctor they are seeing. That can give you the average number of patients per doctor, for example.

3. Conditional formatting lets you change the colors/font settings according to changes in the data. Very convenient for highlighting inventory that is out of stock.

4. Graphs! There's a fair number of graphing options in there. They just don't work well in the Details section.

5. In time, you should learn about Subreports to display subsets of data.

(I'm using the previous version of Crystal, but I don't think any of the above is out of date)

Answer 2

I think using a Crystal Reports Client for building reports is in many ways different than using Crystal in Visual Studio.

First I would definetely try to learn how to build Crystal Reports in client application. Which is more focused on "building" reports.

You can find many white papers here: http://www.crystalreports.com/whitepapers/brochures-whitepapers.asp

In terms of Visual Studio, first you need to gain a good understanding about the Crystal merge modules and especially about how to deply them properly.

There are a few good posts about this on stackoverflow actually. :)

If I can be of any more assistance just shout.