Crystal Report: ASP DOT NET flat feature

Niral Modi

July 30, 2013

ASP.NET is the best platform for creating dynamic websites. Several interactive features can be made available including email functionality real time chatting, monthly reports, and many more.

Crystal Report is the standard feature available in Visual Studio .NET useful to show data. You can display:

• Charts to evaluate data
• Standard reports
• Multiple-level data
• Form Letter
• Drill Down
• Sub reports
• Cross tab reports

Key Advantages of using Crystal Reports

• As crystal reports are created in designer interface, less coding part is covered.
• Complex reports can be made interactive through chart view and hence make easy view of the business model.
• It can easily interact with other ASP.NET web form controls.
• No requirement for installing SQL server for creating reports.

Crystal Reports require database drivers for connecting to the data source to access data. For this purpose, it supports two techniques to access data from the data source:

1. Pull Method: In this method, database driver directly fetch the data from data source. SQL commands are managed by crystal reports itself by using specified driver and thus no coding is required for creating a connection and retrieving data from data source.
2. Push Method: In this method, the developer write the code for connecting to data source and get the data. Multiple crystal reports access the data from data-set. Performance can be optimized by using connection sharing and manually limiting the number of records that are passed on to the report.

Crystal Reports Types

• Strongly-typed style: When any report file is added into the project it becomes a strongly-typed report.
• Un-Typed style:Reports not included as a part into the project are termed as “un-typed” reports. In such category of report, one needs to load report manually.

Exporting Crystal reports

The “Crystal Report Viewer” control do not have export/import button for printing /exporting reports.

The functionality to export a report can be achieved by coding. While exporting report to PDF file format, Acrobat reader will handle printing feature as well as save a copy of the report. To complete this process set a button on your web page to generate the export functionality.

Following formats are available for exporting crystal reports:

• DOC (MS Word Document)
• RTF (Rich Text Format)
• PDF (Portable Document Format)
• HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language)
• XLS (MS Excel Spreadsheet)

If there are billions of data records and there need a group of selective data from a specified range then Crystal report is the best tool for performing easy calculations for the same. Crystal reports give a professional way to perform every calculation. Hyperlinks, Drill Down options, pictorial view, Alert dialogue message to user based on data query, and many more can be done with ease using Crystal reports in ASP DOT NET.