The free version of Crystal Reports that comes with Visual
Studio allows you to create professional looking reports within your
application and can polish up a line of business applications to make it look
professional. This article will build an invoice for the AdventureWorks sample
database that can be downloaded from http://msftdbprodsamples.codeplex.com/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=18407
for SQL Server 2008. Download and install the
SQL2008.AdventureWorks_All_Databases.x86.msi file. The sample was written
using Visual Studio 2008, but it will work with Visual Studio 2005 as well. If
you do not have SQL Server 2008 you can use SQL Server 2005, but you will need
to download the 2005 AdventureWorks samples.
The goal of this article is to create an invoice that looks
like the following figure.
Figure 1
This article will demonstrate how to use master\detail
records, create formula fields, use variables in a report, attach to tables in
a SQL Server database, use the Database Expert to create links between tables,
insert groups in a report, dynamically format groups using the Section Expert,
and how to create summary fields.
The code for this article can be downloaded from the link
given at the end of this article.
