Crystal Reports and Business Logic - VS2005

[AAJ]

Hi all

I use a 3 tier approach for my project, and all comms to the database is
via a BLL layer. This works fine.

I have been lazy in the past, and when reporting via crystal I have created
a connection directly to the database view and recreated the parameters used
on the web pages to display identical information, but in crystal.

This has left me with two problems

1) I have to do all the reports twice. Once for the gridview via my BLL and
once passing parameters to Crystal for the same data filters/ordering etc

2) I occasionally combine data from 2 databases in to a single datatable.
This is done in my BLL using .merge and my datagrid binds to this merged
dataset ( I know I could do this in the database with Unions of the data and
pass them on to my crystal report)

But what I really want to do is to have crystal look at my BLL rather than
at the database. It should be simple, I can see my BLL in crystal using the
databse expert -> .Net objects (I use the System.ComponentModel
throughout), but if I drag it in to crystal, I cant see the fields in the
returned dataset, only the method.

However, if I use ADO.Net Dataset, then I can see the fields.

In summary, I would like to point crystal to my BLL class that returns a
strongly typed dataset and be able to drag the fields on th the report in
design mode, rather then creating a connection directly to the database

can anyone give me a pointer on how to do this..


thanks in advance

Andy

 

[jeff.buzzell]

Andy,

I am interested also. I have followed your posts around the net and find no one is answering them. Let me know if you find a solution.

 

[Curt]

Those of us who have tried to get answers have given up and switched to
SQL Reporting services. It comes Free with VS and It actually works. I
was at a MS meeting and their own rep told me to Abandon all hope of
making CR work with VS 2005. I agree. It's an F'n Nightmare

 

[AAJ]

Hi Jeff

I turned out to be pretty easy

If I get chance, I'll go back through what I did and post a solution later
today.

I seem to remember manually setting up crystal to expect certain fields
,this process was divorced from any actual data, it was just setting up the
field heading etc, and then separately pushing a dataset in to the report
that matched the afore mention report structure.

Andy