One of the powerful features of Visual Studio.Net is the report designer by Crystal Decisions called Crystal Reports.
The Crystal Report Gallery contains “experts” to guide you in creating standard reports, forms, and even mailing labels, or you can use an existing report or generate a new one.
You can display a report from a Windows Form or a Web Form.
It takes two steps to create and display a simple report:
1. Add a Report Designer and design the report template. The template includes the settings for connection to the database and the layout of the report.
2. Add a Crystal Report Viewer control to a form and connect it to the report template.
Once you have added the report to a project and run the project, you can view the report and send the report to the printer, if you wish.
When you create a report template, you are setting up the format of the report. The data are not included in the report layout; instead, each time you run the report, you view the current data.
