Faster CR reporting with datasets

2004-10-28T22:05:00Z

A big problem with CR.NET 2003 is that it is very inefficient when printing from a dataset. Even printing a small report can result in a long delay. The irony is that ADO.NET is the recommended method of working with data in a .NET application. For CR 10, Business Objects has rewritten how reports process ADO.NET datasets so that it is much more efficient. It no longer marshalls objects across app domains. Lucky for us, reports written with CR.NET 2005 will be getting the same code improvements behind the scenes. So slow dataset reports will be a thing of the past! If you want to speed up your reports right away, installing CR 10 on your .NET dev machine will automatically upgrade the .NET components to the latest version.

HTH,

Brian Bischof

www.CrystalReportsBook.com

Learning about CR.NET 2005

2004-10-20T00:53:00Z

For those of you who don't know me, let me introduce myself (Note: most people will want to skip this paragraph and go directly to the next paragraph where I get into the meat of the matter). A couple years ago I was on the newsgroups and I saw a post complaining that there weren't any good Crystal Reports books available for programmers. I figured this couldn't be true (after all, it's been around for ten years) so I researched it on Amazon. Sure enough, all the CR books were for end users and they had very little technical content. (In fact, I remember using VB5 and I got so frustrated trying to figure out how to use CR with multiple data sources that I gave up and bought Active Reports) Due to this newsgroup post, I saw a gap in the marketplace and hence, a new book is born: “Crystal Reports .NET Programming“. Writing this book was pure misery (I'm a programmer, not a writer) and when I finished I swore I would never do it again. But to my surprise, this book has gotten great reviews on Amazon.com and I get numerous emails from programmers thanking me for writing it. This has inspired me to stick with the “book gig“ and continue writing (the pain is lessening as I do more of it). So my next project is to update the book for VS.NET 2005 and see what changes are in store for us programmers. I'm also going to do some writing on CR 11 when that comes out (but more on that later). By the looks of things, CR.NET has really improved in the new version and I will be excited to see the final version come out in the Fall of 2005. Oh yeah, if you want to check out my current CR.NET book, you can find out more and download a couple sample chapters at its website. www.CrystalReportsBook.com

My goal with this blog is to start working with the beta version of CR.NET 2005 and post my comments and concerns here. I hope that this blog will be educational in two respects. First is that people get to see what is on the horizon for CR.NET. Although it will be almost a year before we get to use it in a production app, its always fun to see what new toys we will get to play with. The second part of this blog that I hope will be helpful is that I'm going to be working with Sql Server Reporting Services (SSRS or just RS) to learn how it compares to CR.NET. I see a lot of confusion on the internet about which tool is better than the other. Although I haven't worked with RS yet, its my bet that its a pretty good tool too. Some research is necessary to figure out the strengths and weaknesses of each product so that we as developers can make an educated decision about which tool to use. This is much better than letting the corporate marketing departments “educate” us on which tool to buy. I hope that people who are experts at SSRS will post feedback here so that we can all learn from each other.

Let's start by looking at where we are now: CR.NET 2003. It's a great tool to use and considering that it's free you shouldn't complain. But here's the rub: people do complain (and very loudly I might add). This tool definitely has a learning curve associated with it and its understandable why people get frustrated with it. Let's consider a simple scenario: The first thing people want to do when the get a new tool is run a quick example. So you add a report to your project, connect it to the database and run the app. Nothing happens. How do you make the app open the report and display it to the user? Tough question. Time to start looking for some help. You search the internet, find some sample articles explaining how to add the report viewer and bind it to a report. You try it using the example Access database and it works great. Things are looking up. So now you repeat the steps with your Sql Server database and it doesn't work. Turns out that Sql Server works differently than MS Access now you have to figuire out how to pass login credentials. This is far from easy to do! So you go back to the internet and search for more help. After lots of clicking and Googling you finally find some sample code and your report works. Great! The good news is that its all down hill from here. CR is pretty easy to use for designing reports and adding them to your project. The bad news is that you've pulled out your hair getting this far. It's no wonder that people who don't like CR.NET are very vocal about it. It's my opinion that if it was easier to get over this initial hurdle, then people would be much more accepting of using CR.NET and finding out that it isn't such a hard tool to use. But at this point people are so frustrated that they don't want to hear the word “Crystal“ ever again . Some stick it out and some start looking for other reporting tools (e.g. SSRS).

That leads me to where are we going in the future? CR.NET 2005 has lots of room to grow. First of all, lets make it easier to connect to databases and print a sample report. That is the first experience people have when using CR.NET so that should be made as easy as possible. Secondly, writing reports for ASP.NET needs to be improved as well. There are lots of ways to bind a report to a web form. For the first time user this can be tough to figure out. Cleaning up that process would be a huge help as well. It appears from what I've read, that CR.NET 2005 is addressing these issues head on. It looks like that we will have code snippets which are a template for doing the most common tasks. This will help a lot. I also know that ASP.NET is going to have automatic databinding. That's a huge bonus for CR newbies who shouldn't be expected to figure all this out just to show a simple report. I'm looking forward to playing with these features and seeing how well they work.

Ok, that's the end of my first blog. Man, it's long! Is anybody actually going to read all this? I doubt it. Next time I'll make it shorter. Post your comments if you think I'm full of hot air and I should keep things shorter. Or let me know if you found this helpful and I should continue with it.

Brian Bischof
www.CrystalReportsBook.com

Brian Bischof's Blog

Faster CR reporting with datasets

Learning about CR.NET 2005