Deploying Reports

Have you written a .NET application and deployed it successfully? If so, there is a good chance that you found out it wasn’t as easy as you expected. Microsoft advertises that .NET installations are simple “XCOPY” deployments. That sounds good in advertisements, but it doesn’t always work that way. Some of the problems you can run into are determining how to install the mammoth .NET framework on machines that don’t have it, how to install COM components that the application needs, and what happens when the .NET framework won’t install properly? As .NET matures and it is installed on more machines via service packs and via new installations these problems will decrease. But that doesn’t help us today. These are issues we have to worry about now.

In addition to the issues you have to worry about when installing a standard application, you’ll find that deploying applications that use Crystal Reports has even more requirements. By default, the components that are needed to view and print reports are not included in the .NET Framework. They have to be installed along with your application. To do this you have to know which components are necessary for all reports and which components are only necessary for certain types of reports. This section covers how to create an installation package for deploying reports.