Visual Basic® 2008 Programmer's Reference

Chapter 35. Reporting

Visual Studio 2008 Professional Edition and the higher editions come with Crystal Reports for Visual Studio 2008. 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 msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa287920(VS.71).aspx. 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, Inc., 2004).

Report Objects

Normally, when you think of a report, you probably think of some sort of physical output, either on a computer screen or on paper. In Crystal Reports, a Report object represents the information needed to generate a report. ...