Hiding the Crystal Report Viewer's Statusbar

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Introduction

In .NET, the CyrstalReportViewer control is a very powerful tool. It’s supplied with most of the basics that people would require from it, except for one, straight off the bat. How do I hide the StatusBar? What makes it even more baffling is that you can hide both the group tree and the toolbar using the DisplayGroupTree and DisplayToolbar properties respectively. However, a DisplayStatusbar property is nowhere to be seen.

Dead ends

Under help for the CrystalReportViewer, there is supposed to be ViewerStatusBar property, which gets the StatusBar object. But this doesn't appear to be exposed in either VB.NET or C#. However, if you could get a hold of the StatusBar object, then you could set the StatusBar’s Visible property to False, causing it to be hidden.

So, how do I get hold of the StatusBar then?

More Background

In a nutshell, the CrystalReportViewer control is actually five controls combined. Namely:

1. CrystalDecisions.Windows.Forms.PageView. The main window.
2. System.Windows.Forms.Splitter. A splitter between the main window and the Group Tree.
3. CrystalDecisions.Windows.Forms.ReportGroupTree. A tree view to allow you to drill down on the side of the report.
4. System.Windows.Forms.ToolBar. The tool bar at the top that allows you to do things like export the report, print, etc.
5. System.Windows.Forms.StatusBar. And our status bar that we would like to hide.

The Answer

So knowing that there are actually five controls within the CrystalReportViewer, all we need to do is search through all these controls. Find the StatusBar, and then set its Visible property to False. It’s that simple!

The Code

To set it up as a property for a UserControl (see the source project above), the code would look like this:

Public Property DisplayStatusBar() As Boolean
        Get
            Dim obj As Object
            Dim tempStatusbar As New StatusBar()

            For Each obj In Me.CrystalReportViewer1.Controls
                If obj.GetType Is tempStatusbar.GetType Then
                    Return CType(obj, StatusBar).Visible
                    Exit For
                End If
            Next

            tempStatusbar.Dispose()
            tempStatusbar = Nothing
        End Get
        Set(ByVal Value As Boolean)
            Dim obj As Object
            Dim tempStatusbar As New StatusBar()

            For Each obj In Me.CrystalReportViewer1.Controls
                If obj.GetType Is tempStatusbar.GetType Then
                    CType(obj, StatusBar).Visible = Value
                    Exit For
                End If
            Next

            tempStatusbar.Dispose()
            tempStatusbar = Nothing
        End Set
    End Property

The above code is less than ideal because the only way I could check the type of the control is to create an instance of the StatusBar, and then compare it with what the GetType method returns. Ideally, the code should look something like this:

Set(ByVal Value As Boolean)
    Dim obj As Object
    For Each obj In Me.CrystalReportViewer1.Controls
        If obj.GetType Is System.Windows.Forms.StatusBar Then
            CType(obj, StatusBar).Visible = Value
            Exit For
        End If
    Next
End Set

The reason why I couldn’t do it this way is that the obj.GetType Is System.Windows.Forms.StatusBar seems to be incompatible (System.Type vs. System.Windows.Forms.Type).

Anyway, if someone can get it to work without creating an extra instance of StatusBar, I’d love to hear from them.

Summary

I would like to repeat that this implementation is less than ideal. Then again, it’s less than ideal that we have to do this in the first place. Hopefully, this article obsoletes by the next version of .NET or even Crystal 9, where they may give you the property by default (here’s hoping). But to put all that aside for a moment, it’s a good workaround for hiding the StatusBar when displaying crystal reports in .NET!

I hope this helps someone out there!