I am writing an Item Status Report the takes a Item Number from the user 
and queries several informix tables to display the information on the 
particular item.
The report works fine as long as I output the information to a text box, 
but when printing the report from the browser it looks like crap.
How do you create a crystal report that will connect to a built-on-the-fly 
table?
I also want the ability to give the user the option of displaying the 
report to the screen or printing it directly to the printer. I think if I 
can get the crystal report part to work I shouldn't have any problem of 
printing directly to the priner.
Thanks for any suggestions that you might have.
Chris

I think that I can help you here.

There are several issues that must be addressed.

1) if you are using html you can not get to the users printer directly
2) crystal reports makes many passes (i have been told that it is up to 5)
through the data,
and if you can get speed out of Informix I want to know how you did it.
3) the crystal report html viewer that is bundled with vb.net does not have
the ability to print.

What we have done is a two prong approach (we are using Infomix, html to do
our financial reporting)
A) for reports that run too slow we use an application server and e-mail the
results (excell, word, or pdf format)

B) for short run reports we display them as a pdf file, Adobe can print to
the printer without loosing its format

For speed we setup a dataset (unfortunally dataviews do not work)
and load the data set with all of the tables, queries etc required for the
report.

We then set the datasource on the report to the dataset - This process has
cut our processing time in half.
Crystal makes all of its multiple processes in memory. When you create your
crystal report, an xml datasource
has to be used! This is done similiar to:

dim cr as crystalreport
dim ds as dataset

' open the dataset and load it or add rows programatically

cr.setdatasource(ds) ' attach the dataset to the report

' output the report to the viewer pdf file etc.


I can send you some code that is more specfic if needed.



-----Original Message-----
From: chris.wagner@t... [mailto:chris.wagner@t...]
Sent: Tuesday, December 03, 2002 3:38 PM
To: ASP.NET
Subject: [aspx] How do you do . . . .


I am writing an Item Status Report the takes a Item Number from the user
and queries several informix tables to display the information on the
particular item.
The report works fine as long as I output the information to a text box,
but when printing the report from the browser it looks like crap.
How do you create a crystal report that will connect to a built-on-the-fly
table?
I also want the ability to give the user the option of displaying the
report to the screen or printing it directly to the printer. I think if I
can get the crystal report part to work I shouldn't have any problem of
printing directly to the priner.
Thanks for any suggestions that you might have.
Chris