Adventure in Crystal Reports

I have been tasked to set up our web application to print Crystal Reports .rpt documents to our network printers.

This is my first experience in CR.NET and I am discovering that it is a major source of headaches and frustration for developers everywhere. (as evidenced by the huge amount confused forum posts)

I am going to blog about my progress here, so as to keep tabs on everything. As such this will be an ongoing post.

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Environment Set Up

This is probably the biggest source of ambiguity and cause of confusion and mysterious problems concerning development with Visual Studio and Crystal Reports.

One issue is that there are several different .dll versions for crystal reports and most of them are not cross compatible. While it is possible to set up a section in the web.config to default on one version or another [source]. My opinion is moving more and more towards simply ensuring everything is set up correctly in the first place. That means only having one version, the correct version...

The following article discusses Deploying Visual Studio.net + Crystal Reports Projects and is really a step by step guide for setting up .NET 2.0 with Crystal Reports. The article refers to cr_net_2005_mergemodules_mlb_x86.zip, which contains a readme called CR Deployment using .NET Framework 2.0 Merge Modules.doc. This file contains directions on how to set up various servers.

msdn has the following on setting up the web.config file:

• http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb971177.aspx

Which if you look at the document navigation is one of many articles on using Crystal Reports with both VS2005/.NET 2.0 and VS2008/.NET3.5

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...lots more to come on this article...