Writing a Viewer Utility for Crystal Reports
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by Julia Lerman
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Reports with Parameters

Many reports require parameters, for example, if they are populated with a stored procedure that takes parameters. The ParameterFields property of a loaded report will enable you to discover and set values for the parameters necessary to run the report.

As mentioned previously, by default, a report is saved with its original data in place. When the user re-opens the report, it will show that saved data. Refreshing the report (by clicking the CrystalViewer’s Refresh icon or in code), will force another query of the database and the Crystal Report “Enter Parameter Values” window will open if necessary.  For each parameter that the report requires, the window will display the parameter name, the PromptingText value that was saved with the report , a textbox to enter the value (or a drop down list if there are default values to choose from) and a checkbox for using a Null value for the parameter. If a report collects multiple parameters, the end-user will see one page per parameter with Next and Back buttons, as shown in Figure 5, until they reach the final parameter which then prompts them to Finish.

 

Figure 5 - If there are more than one parameter required, a separate page will be displayed for each parameter.

 

If you do not wish the user to see the saved data when first opening the report, you can refresh the report programmatically using the Refresh method. This will cause the Enter Parameter Values screen to appear before the report.

A more advanced approach would be to iterate through the report’s ParameterField collection and dynamically add labels and input controls to single form which can be presented to the end user, rather than using the default parameter form that the report displays. While building a dynamic form is out of scope for this particular article, the code below shows what to do with the values after they have been collected.

Once the user has entered the values in the dynamically built form, store the values in an ArrayList. The ArrayList works well in this scenario because it is able to store a variety of types.  This is important because the parameters will expect properly typed data (Strings, Booleans, dates, etc.) The following code then takes an ArrayList and sets each item in the ArrayList to the value of each ParameterField in the report. The code assumes that you have proper types as well as the correct number of parameters in your ArrayList and that they are in the same order as the parameters. All of these details are available from the ReportDocument object and should be accounted for when building the dynamic form.

 

The code creates a DiscreteValue whose Value property is set to the value from the ArrayList, then adds this DiscreteValue object to a ParameterValues collection. Then the ParameterValues collection is applied to the particular parameter. The reason the parameter takes a collection of values rather than a single value is because it is possible to have a selection of appropriate values for the end-user to choose from.

  Private Sub UpdateReportParameters(ByVal params As ArrayList)

    Dim discreteVal As New CrystalDecisions.Shared.ParameterDiscreteValue

    Dim currVals As New CrystalDecisions.Shared.ParameterValues

    Dim paramField As _

     CrystalDecisions.CrystalReports.Engine.ParameterFieldDefinition

 

    For iParams As Integer = 0 To _

    rptDoc.DataDefinition.ParameterFields.Count - 1

      paramField = rptDoc.DataDefinition.ParameterFields(iParams)

      discreteVal.Value = params(iParams)

      If discreteVal.Value IsNot Nothing Then

        currVals.Add(discreteVal)

        paramField.ApplyCurrentValues(currVals)

      End If

    Next

  End Sub

If you are setting the parameters using this method, be sure to remove the ReportDocument.Refresh code, otherwise it will set the report’s metadata back to the original values and your new parameter values will be lost.

With a few more tweaks to make your forms look and feel the way your users expect, you can now distribute this utility and allow end users to easily view currently populated reports that were created in the Crystal Reports application or even that you created in the Crystal Report Designer in .NET.


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