 See larger picture | Crystal Reports .NET Programming
by
Brian Bischof
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Product Description I wrote this book from the perspective of a programmer wanting to learn how to integrate reports within a .NET application. I've been working with Crystal Reports since Visual Basic 3 and it's always been difficult to find technical information on report writing.
I spent a year and a half researching what .NET programmers need to successfully create, implement and deploy a Crystal Reports application. I even put the book on the internet for everyone to read for free all of last year. This generated an incredible number of emails from programmers telling me what they liked, disliked, and what was missing from the book. I learned that there are two distinct types of .NET programmers using Crystal Reports.
The first type of programmer doesn't have much experience with Crystal Reports and wants a series of tutorials to help them build reports from scratch. For this programmer I wrote 13 chapters which teach you everything about adding reports to ASP.NET and Windows applications. It starts with the basics of building reports to adding charts, crosstab reports, sorting and grouping, subreports and using the formula editor with Basic syntax and Crystal syntax.
The second type of programmer has been using Crystal Reports for years and is mostly concerned with how to do technical runtime customization of reports. For this programmer I researched and diagrammed the undocumented report object models. I included dozens of examples in both VB.NET and C# to show you how to modify reports, manipulate different data sources (XML, ADO.NET, ODBC, OLE DB, stored procedures with parameters), modify formulas and report parameters, and integrate .NET with the RAS and RDC.
The dozens of emails I received when the book was online were instrumental for doing a major revision of many chapters before publishing the book in hardcopy format. Since releasing the book I continue to receive more emails from people. They regret that the free book isn't online anymore, but understand that it couldn't last forever and that the hardcopy version is even better. I hope you like it and that it helps you achieve your reporting goals.
September 2004 Update: Due to high demand, I did a second printing of the book. I took advantage of this opportunity to go through the book and remove all grammatical errors. The content is the same, but the typos have been corrected.
Featured Customer Reviews  Very good reference book,
July 23, 2008great book. terrible product.,
September 15, 2007 The book is outstanding. packed full of real time, practical info. Brian's online forum is the best.
The problem is crystal reports itself. It repeatedly crashes my VS2005. Business Objects is selling an enterprise server product which delivers CR reports thru the browser. My guess is BO wants to discourage users from using asp.net to access their reports.
As someone using CR for the last 6 weeks to design reports, I would much prefer to ditch the product and try other Windows reporting alternatives. It is totally tedious when working with reports with a lot of columns and total breaks. snap to grid does not always work. Have not been able to figure out how to use one report as a template for another ( ex. the dollar version of a report is a lot like the unit version. problem is I have to code each from scratch. With 12 monthly columns and 5 total breaks, this is hours of needless work. )
BO tech support is brutal. Basically you have to pay $2500 per year for phone support. Otherwise you will waste too much time figuring out how to do what you want with the product. Then for the enterprise version, for the same reason, you will have to pay for another tech support contract.
 Not bad - not good, but good support!,
April 20, 2007
Having read much of the book I find that all the examples and screen shots are from the stand-alone version of Crystal Reports with no attempt to accomodate those readers using the bundled version. In the majority of explanations I am forced to explore the bundled interface trying to find the feature the book is explaining. Sometimes I was unable to find a feature leaving me to wonder if the feature was excluded from the bundled version or if I simply didn't look hard enough.
Some examples simply don't work. The explanation on changing the connection info programaticaly doesn't work with the bundled version - it still reads from the original connection. I don't know if this is because the example is bad or it simply doesn't work with the bundled version.
In addition to the versioning confusion (created by Business Objects admittedly, but not resolved by this book) there are numerous gross grammatical errors in the book. Someone needs to slap the editor awake because that's his/her job and they didn't do it. I'll give you a couple of the most egregious errors.
'The layout tab effects[sic] your interaction with the report designer.'
'This insures[sic] that no matter how short your line is,...'
And yes, I don't have a professional editor either so don't start harping on about spelling or grammatical errors in this review :-)
Now that I read the acknowledgements I see Brian didn't employ a professional editor; two of his friends edited some of the chapters. It shows.
I decided to upgrade to the developer edition of Crystal Reports to gain access to some features I need so perhaps one of my major critisisms of the book will go away and the examples will actually match what I see. But if you think this book will help you learn the bundled version of Crystal Reports you will see a limited return on your investment.
[...]Crystal Reports [..],
February 15, 2007 If you want to create professional looking reports using Crystal Reports, this is the book to read. It is easy to read, and examples are excellent for all programmers.
I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in using Crystal Reports to generate professional looking reports in a short period of time.Need to know what CR does on the object level? this is the book.,
July 26, 2006 If you need to know what's going on under the hood of Crystal reports, this book is a must have.
I had a requirement that a report be able to draw data through a stored procedure from 1 of 4 versions of a SQL Server 2000 Databases determined at runtime. Without this book I would have been forced to use the Push method.
Thanks to this book I was able to write the code to dynamically modify the login information, set the parameters, redirect the data source, and other things inside the ReportDoc object and other objects. I would have never found the UML diagrams and code I needed to track down what to change.
There is nowhere on the Net that had what I needed to know about Crystal Reports, this book does.
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