Report Options in .NET

Reporting involves displaying and printing basic or summarized data to the user for specific business purposes. Visual Basic 2005 Professional Edition includes five primary methods of accomplishing this goal. Other editions add to or reduce this set of choices, and you can always enhance this list using third-party tools.

PrintDocument-Based Printing

As we learned in the previous chapter, the .NET Framework includes a full object-based printing system that uses GDI+ commands to draw text and graphics on each printed page. Because you can put anything you want on each page, you could develop your own custom reports using this method. The responsibility for positioning each label and calculated field on the page, and determining when to move to a new page, will rest entirely on your shoulders. Still, the GDI+ commands are straightforward, and developing some basic reports using this method would not be overwhelming.

If you want to take this route for your reports, I refer you back to Chapter 19, "Printing," and the basic printing concepts presented in that chapter.

HTML/Web Pages

Besides being a significant timewaster, the Internet (and its HTML-based page description language) is a great medium for data-report communication. The table-formatting tags in HTML (such as <td>) let you organize tabular output without much effort. Sure, it's a chore stringing all of those baby-sized text strings together to build the page, but there are ways around that, too.

Back in Chapter 13, "XML," I discussed XSLT (XSL Transformations), a way to take XML-based data, and reshape it into any form you wantincluding great works of art by Michelangelo, or nicely crafted HTML. However you obtain the HTML, you have a choice of display methods as well. The most direct method involves storing the generated HTML in a disk file, and starting the user's default browser to display it using a command such as:

Process.Start("c:\temp\MyReport.htm") 

If you want the report to have a more "integrated" look in your application, you can display the HTML content in a web browser control. We did this in the project code for Chapter 16, "Generics," when we displayed the details of a library item as HTML.

Reporting Services and Controls

Visual Studio includes a set of classes in the Microsoft.Reporting namespace that are specifically designed to report data. The key class in this namespace is the ReportViewer control/class. Actually, it's two controls: one for Windows Forms, and one for Web Forms. These controls are based, in part, on the technology found in Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services, although you can use the controls without SQL Server.

The Library Project will use the WinForms.ReportViewer control for its built-in reports. We'll spend most of this chapter discussing the control and its use in Windows Forms applications. (I won't be discussing the Web Forms version of the control here, although its use closely parallels that of the Windows Forms version.)

Crystal Reports

If you have at least the Professional Edition of Visual Studio 2005, you received a complementary copy of Crystal Reports. The included version is a functional subset of Crystal Reports version XI, Developer Edition. If you are new to Visual Basic, then you have missed out on the previous versions of Crystal Reports that have been included with the language since its earliest releases. Because of this long-time relationship with Visual Basic, Crystal Reports has become one of the most widely used reporting packages on the market.

Crystal Reports is a third-party product, currently owned by a company called Business Objects. The product has changed ownership hands several times over the past 15 years, but Business Objects seems to be taking care of it for now. (I won't be discussing Crystal Reports in this book.)

Integration with Microsoft Office

Visual Basic has been the primary macro language of the Microsoft Office suite of applications since the untimely death of WordBasic. But I'm talking about pre-.NET Visual Basic; Microsoft Office does not yet include direct support for .NET integration. But that doesn't mean you can't interact with the Office products indirectly. How you interact with Office depends on whether the Office document or the Visual Basic application is the primary focus for the user.

If the goal is to have the user open an Office document (such as a Word or Excel file) and have that document interact with managed code, use the new Visual Studio Tools for the Microsoft Office System (abbreviated as VSTO, or "visto"). VSTO installs a small component that shuttles data and events between your Visual Basic code and the unmanaged COM world of Office. Visual Studio includes templates for building VSTO projects right in the development environment.

If the user will access Office features only indirectly through your Visual Basic application (for instance, if you want your program to initiate a Microsoft Word mail merge), use the Microsoft Office Primary Interop Assemblies (PIA) supplied by Microsoft. Like VSTO, these libraries marshal data between your managed code and the unmanaged Office COM libraries, but with the focus on your code instead of the Office document.

I won't be talking about Microsoft Office integration in this book. Use the Visual Studio MSDN documentation, and look in the index for "Visual Studio Tools for Office" if you need additional development information on these resources.