Creating Summary .Net Crystal Reports
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Crystal Reports is one of the important business intelligence tools that allows you to view the same historical data from different angles. This software is created by Business Objects. It is very simple to learn and use, and features a very good user interface. This article will introduce you to the basics of building a Crystal Report.
Why Crystal Reports?
With Crystal Reports you can create simple reports which display data according to your requirements. These include parametrized reports, drill down reports, specified range reports, and more. We can add totals, sub totals and averages to make reports more meaningful and useful. We can create reports in a variety of formats, including print, various electronic formats such as PDF and RTF, or even in HTML format for online reports.
With Crystal Reports, data can be easily sorted (ascending, descending), filtered, and/or grouped with different criteria. We can represent the same data using graphs and charts with Crystal Reports.
Crystal Reports are is widely used with .net applications because the software is provided along with Visual Studio for .net development.
Basic requirements for Crystal Reports
First of all, since we're developers, we need to know what the end user requires. The end user has to tell you how the report should look and what it should contain. Once you gather all of the requirements, you must make a mock up and get it approved by the end user.
Now you need to figure out which type of report will provide the best fit for your requirements. You may want to make additional suggestions based on your knowledge.
Once you decide which type of report you will use, you need to finalize your data source. The data source could be anything: a simple database, a relational database, an Excel sheet, a spreadsheet, text files, XML files, and so on.
Once you find the data source, you must decide which tables you need to use. Sometimes you can use views which are already present. Otherwise, you can create your own views for this particular reporting purpose.
The next step is to design the Crystal report. It should match up with your mock-up. Bind your report with the data source to see the results. Finally, show this to your end user for approval.
We will see details covering all of the different types of reports and how to create them in my upcoming series on Crystal Reports. In this article we will learn how to create a simple report with a database as the data source.
Next: Creating Simple Crystal Reports >>
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