Learning the Report Designer
Many people like to spend their weekends fiddling around their home doing small projects to keep their place fixed up. But before starting any new project, you have to make sure you are familiar with the tools you are going to use on the project. For example, if you just got a new electric saw, then you better read the instruction manual for how it works or who knows what will happen! You need to first spend a little time figuring out how to control the saw and understand how the pieces fit together.
The same applies to Crystal Reports. Even though you are anxious to start dropping charts onto a report and creating Cross-Tabs, you first need to become familiar with the different parts of the report and how the pieces work together. This chapter gives you a solid understanding of the fundamentals for using the report designer before you embark on the more adventurous aspects of creating reports.
You will first see how to set the designer’s properties and how to setup the report’s basic structure. Secondly, you learn how to add and manipulate report objects within the designer. By getting comfortable with how to use the different features of the Report Designer, you will be ready to create more complex reports in the remaining chapters of the book.
Setting Designer Defaults
When working with reports, there are certain aspects that you want to be the same for every report. These are called the default settings (or default properties) because when you open the report they are set by default. For example, you can set the report to automatically force report objects to snap to the grid so that it’s easier to line up objects next to each other. Crystal Reports lets you set these default properties of the report designer so that they are the same for every report you work on.
The primary areas of the Report Designer that you can control are the design area and the formatting properties of certain fields. To change these defaults, select the menu items File > Options. It shows the Options dialog box in Figure 2-1.
Figure 2-1. Report designer Options dialog box.
The Options dialog box might look a little overwhelming at first glance. There are eight different tabs to choose from and each tab has many options listed on it. To make it easier to understand, we are only going to look at the options that affect the Report Designer. We’ll look at the other options later in the book for the sections that they apply to. Table 2-1 shows a description of each tab.
Table 2-1. Option dialog box tab descriptions.
| Tab Name | Description |
|---|---|
| Layout | Sets the defaults for the report designer and the report preview. |
| Database | Changes how the report interfaces with the database and sets advanced optimization properties. This is discussed in Chapter 10. |
| Formula Editor | Sets the default programming language and code formatting properties. This is discussed in Chapter 5. |
| Reporting | Specifies how report data is treated. For example, it determines how to handle Null values, whether to save report data with the report, etc. This is discussed in various areas throughout the book. |
| Fields | Set the default formatting of each type of data. For example, you can have strings formatted differently than numbers. This is discussed in this chapter. |
| Fonts | Similar to the Fields tab, the Fonts tab sets the default formatting for different types of data. For example, you can specify a default format for summary fields that is different than the format of group name fields. |
| Smart Tag & HTML Preview | Sets up the properties used by Office XP smart tags and previewing reports in HTML format. This applies to Business Objects Enterprise and is not discussed in this book. |
| Dependency Checker | Determines which aspects of a report the dependency checker should analyze. This is discussed in Chapter 5. |
