Summary

In this hour, you have learned a bit about the history of Crystal Reports developer tools and what is currently available in Crystal Reports 9. For the desktop developer, the Report Designer Component provides the richest SDK available, giving the developer the ability to design reports from within the Visual Basic development environment, manipulate, print, and export them using the object model, and display them using the ActiveX report viewer.

For developers using the Web to deliver reports, report viewers are available for the COM, .NET, and Java platforms. These report viewers render any report to HTML and thus provide a zero-client report delivery solution. If and when developers want more control over the report and have more of a need for interactive applications, a Report Application Server SDK is also available in the same three platforms that can be used to build advanced Web applications.

This hour has just been an introduction to the developer tools in Crystal Reports 9: There is much more to learn. A good place to start is the Crystal Reports documentation, both printed and electronic. In addition, the Technical Support site found at http://support.crystaldecisions.com has many sample applications and technical briefs on Crystal Reports developer tools. Use that site as another resource.