Report Designer Architecture
Technically, the Report Designer Component is implemented as a series of COM (Component
Object Model) objects that work with the Visual Basic design and run time environment. The
diagrams below illustrates the design and run time interactions.
Visual Basic Environment (Design Time)
Visual Basic Environment (Run Time or Application EXE)
| Note | Blue arrows indicate methods, properties and events that Visual Basic developers can manipulate directly and red arrows represent internal communication between the Seagate Crystal Reports components. |
Component Descriptions
| Report
Designer UI Component |
This is a COM component that provides the user interface at design time for the user to interact with and create or modify the report. |
| Report
Designer Design Time Component |
This is an underlying COM component that provides services for the user interface component. |
| Report
Designer Run Time Component |
This is essentially the standard run time Report Engine. It is the component that encapsulates all of the report objects and is responsible for doing all the processing of the report. |
| Crystal
Report Data Driver |
This is a standard component of the Seagate Crystal Reports architecture that provides access to various types of data sources. |
| Crystal Report Smart Viewer | This component is an Active X control which can be drawn on a form and manipulated at design time. It provides a rich object model which can be used to modify the behavior of the Report Preview window at run time. This component is required only if the developers want to display the report at run time. |
| Data Set | One of the
following: Data Access Object (DAO) RecordSet Remote Data Object (RDO) ResultSet Active Data Object (ADO) RecordSet Crystal Data Object (CDO) |
| These objects do not need to be valid at design time, for example you could construct a report ‘template’ at design time without the data being available. However, the data set objects must be present and valid at run time to generate a report. | |
| VB Form | The Smart Viewer control must be embedded on a form in order to see the report preview window. The Report creation experts will automatically add a form with the Smart Viewer embedded to the project if the option is selected. |
For the latest information about this
product, please visit the web site at www.seagatesoftware.com/scrvbasic.
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