In the past few years the ability to report on geographical
data has become a task that does not require an army of developers to
accomplish. Before the mapping functionality in Crystal Reports and other services,
such as Google maps and the new Geography data types in SQL Server 2008,
developers spent a great deal of time working to visualize geographical data on
a map.
Crystal Reports has had mapping functionality built in for
the past few versions. This functionality is provided from a third-party
company named MapInfo. Currently, Crystal Reports contains a limited number of
map types, but additional map types and "layers" can be purchased
from MapInfo.
The default mapping functionality is also limited in what
types of geographical data can be interpreted. Currently the default
functionality can interpret state names/abbreviations, country
names/abbreviations and limited city names. Additional functionality to support
interpretation of geographical data, such as postal code and latitude/longitude
points, can be purchased from MapInfo or a different tool can be used to render
a map as an image and include it in the report, which we will discuss later in
this article.