Using Crystal Services
Crystal Reports for Visual Studio allows you to connect programmatically to your reports via the Crystal Services web service. Crystal Services make it easy to connect to reports that are exposed by various servers on the network.
The report sources behind these sub nodes and the classes that they generate (when they are dragged onto the Web or Windows Form) vary across successive versions of Crystal Reports. For a complete listing of the Crystal Services available in each version, along with detailed instructions about how to access these Crystal Services in your code, see the following sections:
- CrystalReportViewer Binding Scenarios that Use Crystal Services
- ReportDocument Binding Scenarios that Use Crystal Services (VS.NET 2002 and 2003)
Using Crystal Services with Crystal Reports Basic for Visual Studio 2008
In Visual Studio 2005 and later, Crystal Services is accessed programmatically. Crystal Services allows you to generate a list of reports available on a local or remote machine, and access those reports via a web service.
Connection code must be entered manually in Crystal Reports for Visual Studio. For a detailed example, see Tutorial: Populating a DropDown List of Reports from a Web Service.
Crystal Services uses the Report Web Services protocol to access a virtual directory on the server, known as the viewers' virtual directory. For more information, see Viewers' Virtual Directory.
Using Crystal Services with Crystal Reports for Visual Studio .NET 2003
In Crystal Reports for Visual Studio 2003, Crystal Services were accessed from the Server Explorer.
The Crystal Services sub node within each server expands to reveal further sub nodes. The names of these sub nodes vary across versions of Crystal Reports, but their common behavior is that each Crystal Services sub node expands to display a list of reports, either from the file directory of the local machine or from servers on the network.
In some cases, a Crystal Services sub node uses the Report Web Services protocol. In that case, it uses that protocol to access a virtual directory on the server, known as the viewers' virtual directory.
Note
For more information, see Viewers' Virtual Directory.
In other cases, a direct connection is made to an unmanaged RAS server, Crystal Reports Server or BusinessObjects Enterprise. In that case, the Report Web Service protocol is not used.
Note
The nodes that are available depend on your configuration and your licensing agreement.
A report that is exposed through the Crystal Services node can be dragged into the component tray of Web or Windows forms in Visual Studio .NET 2003.