The Report Designer Component

While Visual Studio .NET is gaining popularity as a leading-edge development environment, Visual Basic 6 is still in widespread use throughout the industry. Accordingly, Crystal Reports 10 still provides its most robust programming interface for it (you can still gain the most control over report behavior with Visual Basic interfaces than with Visual Studio .NET interfaces). This programming integration method is the Report Designer Component, or RDC. While there are few revisions to Version 10 of the RDC, it still provides a great deal of coding flexibility when working with embedded Crystal Reports.

What continues to be absent from the version 10 RDC (as well as the VS.NET interfaces) is support for newer enterprise Crystal Reports features, such as the repository and new Crystal Enterprise 10 Business Views. The ability to add, remove, or update objects in the repository, or base reports on Business Views, is not provided with the version 10 RDC.

Part III Does Not Teach You Visual Basic!

The rest of Part III assumes you have a beginning-to-intermediate working knowledge of Visual Basic. It's not practical to try to teach you VB at the same time you're learning how to integrate reports. You'll need to have a fundamental knowledge of how to create VB forms and how to respond to events. There are many good texts (including several from McGraw-Hill/Osborne), training programs, and interactive tutorials available to teach you these fundamental skills.

Also, this section assumes that you have gleaned report design knowledge from Part I of this book. Crystal Reports features, such as selection criteria, parameter fields, and object and section formatting, will be covered. If necessary, refer to Part I to brush up on these report design topics.

Note  

The RDC is available only with Crystal Reports 10 Developer or Advanced Developer Edition ”it isn t included with the Standard or Professional Edition. If you re using Visual Basic with the RDC, you must use Visual Basic 5 or later. The RDC can also be used with other languages that support standard Microsoft COM Libraries.