Creating Crystal Reports using C# with Datasets

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Introduction

This article is about creating Crystal Reports using C#.NET. About two weeks back, one of my friends asked me this kind of example, also he searched through the Internet and he told that he couldn’t find a sample. When I was doing this kind of developments I’m also looked for samples, but I couldn’t find one. That’s why I did this article to CodeProject without creating reports separately using Crystal Reports other than using .NET IDE.

Create a Dataset

First you should create a Dataset to get the data from the DB. By clicking the “Add New Item” in the “Project” menu you can add a Dataset. A picture of an added Dataset is looks like the following window and can add elements to the Dataset by dragging and dropping elements from the toolbox. This Dataset is used to fill the data, which is getting from the DB by using a query. Because of that the names of the elements in this Dataset should be equal to the names of the elements in the DB. For an example this Dataset can fill using the following query.

String connString = @"Provider=Microsoft.Jet.OLEDB.4.0;Data Source=..\\..\\myDB.mdb;User ID=Admin;Password=";

OleDbConnection conn = new OleDbConnection(connString);

conn.Open();

string query = "SELECT studentID, firstName, lastName, birthDate, address, contactNo FROM studentInfo";

OleDbDataAdapter oleDA = new OleDbDataAdapter(query,conn);

 Create a Report using Crystal Reports

Now you have a created Datset, then we can use it to fill the report with data, which will be getting from the DB. As I said before you can add a Crystal Report to the project by clicking “Add New Item” in the “Project” menu. Then the following window will appear, and you can select your choices and click OK.

Next window is like the following and you have to select your created Dataset under “Project Data”, and click “Insert Table”, then click next.

Then you have to add the field, which you want to display in the report through the following window and click next.

Also you can go to other tabs of this window and select/ deselect your choices. Use the last tab “Style” to select the format of the report. Also you can type a Report Title here and click finish.

Then your report creation is done by the .NET IDE. If you want to do any changes to the report you can do it by using the .NET IDE.

Set the created Report to display in the Form

Then you have to set a “crystalReportViewer” in your form to load the report that you created earlier. And also you need to set the report source of this “crystalReportViewer” component, which is falling in the properties panel or you can set the report source by using the code like the following.

// code to get data from the DB

DBConnection DBConn = new DBConnection();

OleDbDataAdapter myDataAdapter = DBConn.getDataFromDB();

// use the created Dataset to and fill it with data getting

// from the DB by using the DataAdapter

DataSet dataReport = new DataSet();

myDataAdapter.Fill(dataReport,"myPersonalInfoTable");

// create a new report from the created CrystalReport

myDataReport myDataReport = new myDataReport();

// set the data source of the report

myDataReport.SetDataSource(dataReport);

// set the report source of the created “crystalReportViewer”

// component to the created report

crystalReportViewer1.ReportSource = myDataReport;

Additional Information

Also you can create reports using Crystal Reports separately without using the .NET IDE. For that you have to install Crystal Reports as well, and you should save those reports in a directory. Then you have to set the report source of the “crystalReportViewer” component to the particular report under your report Directory.

Ex:-

crystalReportViewer1.ReportSource = @“..\Reports\salesReport.rpt”;

But the better way is the previous one, because we can get the data from the DB according to the inputs, which are doing by the user of the Applications.

Regarding this article you can send any question to isharasjc@gmail.com, then I will send you any information that you want to your development.