Examining the Report Designer
Each report within your application is just like any other component that your application uses. It is listed in the Solution Explorer window as a class in your project. When you double-click it, it opens the report in design mode and you can make changes to it.
Each report starts with five sections: Report Header, Page Header, Detail, Page Footer, and Report Footer. These sections are described in Table 1-1.
Table 1-1. Report sections.
| Section | Description |
|---|---|
| Report Header | Appears at the top of the first page of the report. |
| Page Header | Appears after the Report Header on the first page. On all the remaining pages it appears at the top of the page. |
| Group Header | Appears at the beginning of each new group. |
| Details | The row that displays the record information. There is usually one detail row for every record in the table. |
| Group Footer | Appears after all records of a group have been printed. |
| Page Footer | Appears at the bottom of each page. |
| Report Footer | Appears as the bottom of the page for the last page in the report. |
To the left of the report layout is the Toolbox as shown in Figure 1-10. When you have the report designer open, there are only a few controls available in the Toolbox. They are the Text Object, Line Object, and Box Object. These are the most basic of the controls available.
Figure 1-11. Crystal Report’s toolbox.
Oddly enough, there are more controls that can be used on a report, but they aren’t listed in the toolbox. You have to select the menu options Crystal Reoports > Insert (or right-click on the report and select the Insert menu option). This menu is shown in Figure 1-11. There are ten controls on it that can be added to a report as well as a lot of special fields that display report specific information (e.g. page number, print date, etc.). These controls are described in Chapter 2.
Figure 1-12. Crystal Report’s Insert menu.
In the bottom right hand corner of the IDE is the Properties window. As expected, these properties are only applicable for the control that has the focus.
