Introduction to the Report Designer Component

This section will give you a brief explanation of what the Report Designer Component is and how it works with Visual Basic. An understanding of this material is not crucial but it will help you understand how the internals of the designer work at both design time and run time.

What is the Report Designer Component?

The Report Designer  Component is an ActiveX designer object which provides a report design window inside of the Visual Basic Integrated Development Environment (IDE). An ActiveX Designer component has a design window which allows visual modification of the object and a potentially different run time appearance and behavior. A good example of an ActiveX Designer is the standard Visual Basic form which provides a rich design time environment where you can add controls and other objects to the form to create a more sophisticated object. The form has similar look but different behavior at run time. ActiveX Designers can be created by either Microsoft or other third-party vendors and can be "plugged in" to Visual Basic for use in existing or new projects. These components help expand what you can do with Visual Basic while behaving in a consistent fashion with the rest of Visual Basic IDE.

So, to answer the original question, the Report Designer Component is an ActiveX designer which specializes in simplifying reporting tasks such as connecting to Visual Basic project data, formatting and modifying report fields. In addition to making reporting in Visual Basic easier, the designer also exposes the Crystal Reports Automation Server object library. This gives the Report Designer Component a simple design time interface with very powerful run time reporting and analysis capabilities.

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