Reporting with Visual Studio and Crystal Reports

The simplest way to learn Crystal Reports and Visual Studio is to follow the hands-on exercises in this tutorial. In no time you'll be producing stunning charts and be able to create a reporting application from scratch.

Overview

• A step-by-step guide that goes beyond theory, letting you get hand-on experience
• Utilize a dataset and table adapter as data sources for your report
• Learn how to add reports to forms and pass parameters dynamically

In Detail

Reports are documents that present focused, salient content to a specific audience. Crystal Reports is a business intelligence application that will help you design and generate reports from a wide range of data sources. It helps you summarize a good deal of information in a visually appealing manner.

"Reporting with Visual Studio and Crystal Reports" is a practical, hands-on guide that will provide you with a number of clear, step-by-step exercises, and help you take advantage of the real power of Crystal Reports. This book will not only help you create effective reports, but also teach you how to create a reporting application.

"Reporting with Visual Studio and Crystal Reports" will guide you through the installation of Crystal Reports and Visual Studio. As you progress from one chapter to the next, you will gradually build a reporting application. You will also learn how to select the right data, and enhance your report by grouping and sorting data. This book will also help you create chart reports to improve your report design. With this book, you will learn how to create a complete reporting application and a wide variety of reports.

What you will learn from this book

• Set up Microsoft Visual Studio, Crystal Reports, and Microsoft SQL server
• Create a new reporting application
• Design the application GUI
• Connect to a database and use a dataset and table adapter
• Add Crystal Reports to the application
• Add database fields to the report and format them
• Group and sort report data using parameter fields and special fields

Approach

A fast-paced, example-based guide to learn how to create a reporting application using Visual Studio and Crystal Reports.

Who this book is written for

"Reporting with Visual Studio and Crystal Reports" is for developers new to Crystal Reports. It will also prove useful to intermediate users who wish to explore some new techniques in Crystal Reports using Microsoft Visual Studio. Readers are expected to have basic knowledge of C#, Microsoft Visual Studio, and Structured Query Language (SQL).