Mastering Crystal Reports 9

Overview

In Chapter 1, “Building Your First Report,” we introduced the concept of Crystal Reports being a banded report writer that contains five basic bands, or sections, that are initially created for every report. In this chapter, we want to dig deeper into customization options that allow you to control both the appearance and behavior of sections and the information contained in a section area.

Sections allow you to control a group of report elements in a common way. Changing how a field or text label looks one at a time is easy enough, but if you had to manually change the font on every field, it would quickly become a tedious endeavor. You can think of a section as a container for the fields, images, and labels placed in the section during report design. A single report can have many of these containers that group and style the information they hold. That container, or section area, can be formatted to behave according to rules that you design, forcing all of the report elements in that section to have the same behavior and visual attributes.

Featured in this chapter:

• Hiding sections completely

• Using drill-down sections for groups

• Creating underlays

• Using formulas to control visibility

• Creating columns within sections

• Sizing a section to fit your data

• Changing spacing options