What is Crystal Reports?

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Crystal Reports has been part of Visual Studio since 1993, and is now the standard for reporting in Visual Studio. It ships with every copy of Visual Studio Professional and is integrated directly into the development environment.

Crystal Reports for Visual Studio brings the ability to create interactive, presentation-quality content to the Windows environment. With Crystal Reports for Visual Studio, you can create complex and professional reports in a GUI-based program. Then you can connect your report to almost any database source, as well as to proxy data, such as a result set (for example, an ADO.NET DataSet). With the wizards included in the GUI designer, you can easily set formatting, grouping, charting, and other criteria.

You can host your report in either a Web or Windows application, with one of the Crystal Reports for Visual Studio viewer controls. Report presentation in both Windows and HTML 3.2 or 4.0 clients is highly interactive and provides you with features such as chart drill down, report navigation, and text search.

Crystal Reports for Visual Studio ships with an extensive SDK. You can use the SDK to interact with the report programmatically at runtime, by use of one of four possible object models:

  • CrystalReportViewer, the simplest object model.
  • ReportDocument, the more extensive object model.
  • ReportClientDocument, the most extensive object model. This object model is available with Crystal Reports 2008 or with a RAS Server.
  • InfoObject, a powerful object model for scheduling and configuring reports within the Crystal Reports Server or BusinessObjects Enterprise framework.

Note

The CrystalReportViewer object model and the ReportDocument object model are available with all versions of Crystal Reports for Visual Studio. The ReportClientDocument object model and the InfoObject object model require upgraded licensing. See Upgrade Options.

Your reports can be related to your Visual Studio project in many ways:

  • Embed your reports directly into the project.
  • Access them externally, from a file directory.
  • Access them as a Report Web Service from a remote server.
  • Connect to them as Crystal Services.
  • With an upgrade to Crystal Reports Server you can access them through the RAS server.
  • With an upgrade to BusinessObjects Enterprise, you can access them through the Page server or the RAS server contained within the BusinessObjects Enterprise framework.

Here is an example of how reports might operate within a Visual Studio project:

Crystal Reports is used to design a report that enables users to drill down on a chart and filter information, in accordance with their needs. That report has been included in an ASP.NET project, and then displayed in a Web Form with a CrystalReportViewer control that is bound to that report. The report can be interacted with by use of the ReportDocument object model.

See Also