Frustration and Excitement with Crystal Reports

[Tony K]

Getting the former. Not the latter.

As some of you may know (Terry...btw thanks for all your help), I have been
battling a Crystal Reports problem. I have recently made the discovery that
my "Current Connections" or ADO.NET options for the database expert in CR
are not working with my project.

IF I create a new connection to my Access DB(DAO) or use OLE DB(ADO)
connection I will receive correct data (results) on my report for the first
time. Whew Hoo! If I use my ADO.NET Dataset connection from my "Current
Connections" or from my project, I GET N-O-T-H-I-N-G. By 'nothing' I mean
when the report is shown in the report viewer, not one piece of data shows
up.

I cannot use the ones that work unfortunately because when this entire
project is complete, the Access DB may reside on a network drive (ie.
M:\InventoryMan agement.mdb) These paths that are created, I wouldn't know
where to begin to modify them.

How do I fix this $%^&*#@ problem??
Tony K

[=?Utf-8?B?U3VydHVyWg==?=]

I know this will sound flippant, but I think the solution is to ditch Crystal
and write your report in VB. I struggled with Crystal for over a year. For
simple single-table queries it is fine, but once you want a little bit more
than that, you would be better off spending the time learning VB than arguing
with Crystal.

Many reports require record-by-record processing, and Crystal is
spectacularly bad at that.

Your particular problem would disappear with VB, too, since you could
specify your connection string using a path loaded from an INI file.
--
David Streeter
Synchrotech Software
Sydney Australia
"Tony K" wrote:

Getting the former. Not the latter.

As some of you may know (Terry...btw thanks for all your help), I have been
battling a Crystal Reports problem. I have recently made the discovery that
my "Current Connections" or ADO.NET options for the database expert in CR
are not working with my project.

IF I create a new connection to my Access DB(DAO) or use OLE DB(ADO)
connection I will receive correct data (results) on my report for the first
time. Whew Hoo! If I use my ADO.NET Dataset connection from my "Current
Connections" or from my project, I GET N-O-T-H-I-N-G. By 'nothing' I mean
when the report is shown in the report viewer, not one piece of data shows
up.

I cannot use the ones that work unfortunately because when this entire
project is complete, the Access DB may reside on a network drive (ie.
M:\InventoryMan agement.mdb) These paths that are created, I wouldn't know
where to begin to modify them.

How do I fix this $%^&*#@ problem??
Tony K

[Rich P]

If you are using VS2005 (.Net Framework 2.0 or higher), there is a
Report Viewer Control/component. This works about exactly like Sql
Server Reporting Services (for sql server 2000 RS) except that the
report file is a .rdlc instead of a .rdl. You can easily populate a
Report Viewer control from data contained in a local dataset. You can
import your data from whatever source (Access, an xml file, a text file,
sql server ...) into a dataset table. Then you can tweak the data as
you need and display it in the Report Viewer.

Rich

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