Using the Embedded Crystal Reports Designer

Crystal Reports is used to add reporting capabilities to your application or Web Service. You can create a report from scratch or you can use one of the Crystal Report Creation Wizards to help you through the design process.

The reports you create can be used in both Web and Windows applications. You can also publish a Crystal report as a Report Web Service on a Web server.

Regardless of what you decide to do with your report, you will create and make changes to the report itself in the embedded Crystal Reports Designer. The embedded Crystal Reports Designer enables you to design and modify reports inside the Visual Studio Integrated Development Environment (IDE). The designer can be directly programmed from within Visual Studio IDE. You do not need to distribute the designer with your report.

Note

For detailed instructions that specifically address how to create reports within your Windows or Web project, see Tutorials. After following the Tutorial step procedures, you will have created reports and learned how to interact with them programmatically at run time.

In this section:

• Embedded Crystal Reports Designer Overview

  Explains the layout and tools of the embedded Crystal Reports Designer.

• Designing New Reports

  Explains how to access the embedded Crystal Reports Designer and provides detailed steps on how to design a new report.

• Customizing Existing Reports

  Describes how to import reports that use non-Crystal formats, contain unsupported drivers, or were created with an older version of Crystal Reports.

• Optimizing Report Performance

  Suggests ways to increase the performance speed of reports.