Chapter 25: Reporting

Visual Studio 2005 Professional Edition and the higher editions come with Crystal Reports for Visual Studio 2005. Crystal Reports is a product that helps you build, display, and print reports in Visual Basic applications.

Crystal Reports is a large and complex application that provides a huge number of wizards, formats, charts, and other tools for building reports, so there isn’t enough room here to do it justice. This chapter provides a quick introduction to using Crystal Reports to build a few simple examples. For more detailed information about particular topics, consult the online help at msdn.microsoft.com/library/en-us/crystlmn/html/crconcrystalreports.asp. The help includes several examples that show how to make reports with certain common formats.

You may also want to visit the web site of Business Objects (the makers of Crystal Reports) at www.businessobjects.com and their web page for Crystal Reports www.businessobjects.com/ products/reporting/crystalreports/default.asp.

For more in-depth information, read a book that covers only Crystal Reports. Quite a few books about Crystal Reports are available for developers with all levels of experience, including Professional Crystal Reports for Visual Studio .NET (Wiley Publishing, 2004).

64-bit Issues

While testing the example programs for this chapter on my new 64-bit computer, I discovered that these programs looked fine in the development environment but could not load reports at runtime. The computer did not have runtime support for 64-bit reports.

To work around this issue, open Solution Explorer and double-click the application’s My Project entry. Select the Compile tab and click the Advanced Compile Options button to display the dialog box shown in Figure 25-1. In the Target CPU drop-down at the bottom, select x86 and click OK. Now the application will use the 32-bit Crystal Reports runtime libraries instead of looking for 64-bit versions. Alternatively you can go to the Business Objects web site and download 64-bit runtime libraries.

Figure 25-1: To run reports on 64-bit computers, you can set the target CPU to x86.