How Should I Use This Guide?
If you’re already familiar with Visual Basic,
the best way to use this guide depends largely on your reporting experience. Refer to one
of the sections below to understand what you’ll learn in this guide and how the
Report Designer may be different from the tool you’re using now. While the Report
Designer makes reporting in Visual Basic as simple and as fast as possible, it’s
still important to have some basic understanding of databases and the various techniques
Visual Basic can use to access them.
New Seagate Crystal Reports Users
If you’re new to Seagate Crystal Reports,
you’ll find that it uses a "banded" report structure to design reports.
This is simply a logical way of breaking up the report into headers, footers, summary
groups and detailed data. Seagate Crystal Reports is a very powerful reporting tool, but
has a number of features which make it easy to design both simple and fairly complex
reports. It also can interface to virtually any data source and has a large number of
formatting features for producing presentation-quality reports.
You should have no trouble working through the examples in this guide, but for more
information on Seagate Crystal Reports and report design in general, you should consult
the online help. You may also want to open some of the supplied sample reports to get a
better idea of the different types of reports and how they look in the designer.
Existing Seagate Crystal Reports Users
If you already use a previous version of Seagate
Crystal Reports, you will already be familiar with a lot of the reporting concepts and
terminology used in this guide. This guide will help you understand how the Report
Designer integrates the reporting environment into your applications and how to take
advantage of some of the event oriented features.
Version 5 or 6
If you’re a version 5 or 6 user, you’ll notice that the
Report Designer and Report Viewer windows look fairly similar to what you’re using
now. The major visible differences are the addition of the Field View pane and the ability
to directly set report object properties. Right clicking on report objects will also
display several options including the familiar Seagate Crystal Reports formatting menus.
Other important changes include the ability to format objects using VB code instead of the
Crystal Formula language, and the use of VB services to establish data source connections.
Other Versions
If you’re a user of earlier versions of Seagate Crystal
Reports, you’ll notice a new look and feel in the designer interface with easier ways
of adding and manipulating fields, sections and other report objects. If you’re used
to using the earlier OCX in your projects, you will find some major differences in how you
add reporting to your VB projects. The Report Designer makes setting report properties and
exchanging data much easier. You can now use Visual Basic to perform a lot of the select
and formatting operations that you used to do in Seagate Crystal Reports. Since this
component has most of the features of our current Version 7 product, you may also want to
review some of the new features we've added. An overview of some of the major changes can
be found on our web site by clicking here.
In a nutshell, using the Report Designer allows you to concentrate on what your report
does and how it looks, instead of how you have to interface to Seagate Crystal Reports.
To Find Out More
A lot of the cool features in the Report Designer are actually part of the OLE Automation
Server in Seagate Crystal Reports 7. Taking a quick scroll through the Visual Basic Object
Browser will give you an idea of the many properties and events you can use as well as
some brief descriptions. Also, be sure to check the Seagate Crystal Reports web site for
developer resources, product information and the latest news about the Report Designer.
For the latest information about this
product, please visit the web site at www.seagatesoftware.com/scrvbasic.
Copyright ⌐ 1998 Seagate Software Inc. All rights reserved. Click here for additional information.