Crystal Reports 10: The Complete Reference

Overview

So far, this book has discussed many techniques for creating sophisticated reports with the Crystal Reports 10 designer. Part III of the book discusses methods for integrating those reports into your custom Windows applications with Visual Basic and Visual Studio .NET. However, business organizations, both large and small, continue to turn to web- based technology for both internal corporate intranets and the Internet. Accordingly, providing a way to display your reports in a web browser is crucial.

Crystal Reports 10 continues in this web-based direction by providing various options for placing your reports on the Web, depending on Crystal Reports edition, your particular web environment, and your budget (many options require upgrades or additional licenses). From simple HTML exports to a multitier, multiserver enterprise-wide implementation of Crystal Enterprise Premium, you have many choices to consider when looking toward web distribution and customization of Crystal Reports.

If you re familiar with Crystal Reports 9, you may feel that the core Crystal Reports 10 designer (covered in Part I of this book) has undergone too few changes to deserve a full version number increase. While this is a valid argument, the new version of Crystal Enterprise has gone through major enhancements and is certainly worthy of the full version number increase. These new features, as well as a release schedule that coincided with the Crystal Reports 10 release, lend themselves to a more integrated Crystal Reports/Crystal Enterprise 10 package. There are, as before, various versions of Crystal Enterprise, including Embedded Edition (formerly known as RAS Edition), Crystal Enterprise Express Edition (formerly known as Standard Edition), and Crystal Enterprise Professional and Premium Editions.

Both improved Java and .NET support are included with Crystal Reports 10. Both Crystal Reports and Crystal Enterprise Java interfaces have been improved to support JSP/J2EE-based web reporting deployments. Microsoft s emerging ASP.NET is supported more fully with both Crystal Reports and Enterprise. And, there are still legacy web alternatives as well, including the COM-based Report Designer Component that supports standard web connectivity via Active Server Pages on a Microsoft Internet Information Server.

These different options give you even more choices than before (and, potentially introduce additional levels of confusion) on how to place a Crystal Report on the Web ”either on your internal corporate intranet or on the entire Internet:

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