I have found myself working on projects where reports have
been last minute additions that demanded a great deal of time and a certain
touch of detail. Many times, reports are cobbled together, with good design and
performance falling to the wayside. Reports are the primary representation of
the data on your system; after putting so much hard work into the application
that is collecting data it is important to put a little extra effort forth to
design truly "killer" reports for your application.
The development tips in this article are primarily intended
for developers without much experience with Crystal Reports. This article
assumes the reader has a basic knowledge of Crystal Reports data access.
We will cover six quick tips that will enable you to quickly
create reports that are richly featured. We will start with a basic report that
a manager of a project may ask for; order fulfillment. The following examples
will be created from the SQL Server 2000 Northwinds Trading Company sample database. The sample report referenced throughout this
article pulls data from the Orders, Customers, and Products tables. The report
is intended to be a representation of a typical order fulfillment report. It
groups orders together, and displays information about each product under the
order. The examples below are using Crystal Reports 2008, but have also been
tested with Crystal Reports XI.