Crystal Reports XI for Developers (Paperback)

by David McAmis (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description
Crystal Reports XI is a powerful software tool for turning raw data into corporate decision-making information. End-users and developers alike use Crystal Reports to extract and format information, and with over 9 million licenses shipped, Crystal Reports is one of the most popular packages for corporate reporting. This book provides a solid introduction for any report or application developer just getting started. Using this practical guide, they will learn to create presentation-quality reports from a variety of data sources and how to add the advanced features developers need, such as subreports, cross-tabs, charts, geographic maps, and more. Developers will also learn to create simple to complex reports with the formatting and organization techniques presented in the book, and how to add filtering and summaries to crunch millions of rows of data into a concise and meaningful format. Crystal Reports XI for Developers is filled with step-by-step essentials and real-world examples that teach developers how to take full advantage of Crystal Report’s key features to create information-rich, quality reports from their own data.

KEY FEATURES: * Teaches Crystal Reports from a developer’s perspective, from creating the first report and adding advanced formatting features to analyzing the report data and the code behind the report and expressions * Provides clear and easy-to-understand instruction, leveraging developers experience and knowledge with other desktop applications * developers need, including subreports, cross-tabs, charts, geographic maps, drawing objects * Discusses the various methods and issues with deployment and integration on various platforms such as Visual Studio .NET, ASP.NET, Java, and JSP * Includes a companion CD-ROM with all of the source code, sample reports, and figures from the book

About the Author
David McAmis (Sydney,Australia) is an IT consultant and the author of over a dozen technical books, including Professional Crystal Reports in Visual Studio.NET, Crystal Reports: A Beginner’s Guide, Exchange 2000 Administrators Guide, Exchange Server 2003 Delta Guide, and How to Do Everything with InfoPath 2003.He is a Crystal Certified Consultant, a Crystal Certified Trainer, and a Crystal Solutions Partner, and his work has appeared in various computer magazines and trade journals

Product Details

• Paperback: 464 pages
• Publisher: Charles River Media; 1 edition (November 21, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1584504110
• ISBN-13: 978-1584504115
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 7.2 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #501,044 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

25 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Weak on Development Details, June 14, 2006

By	Clark B. Timmins "q-25" (West Jordan, UT USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This book is not titled particularly well. It does present a good amount of detail about how to develop a report within Crystal Reports--but it does not do a very good job of telling you how to embed those reports into other applications, or how to call the reports from other applications. In other words, if it was titled something like 'Crystal Reports Reference' it would be a pretty good book--but it's definitely not going to serve up the kind of hard-hitting developmental details you would expect for a "developer's guide".

If you're looking for a very plain-vanilla introduction to Crystal Reports integration, this is perhaps sufficient. But if you're looking for the nuts-and-bolts of how to actually fully integrate Crystal Reports into your application--this book will dissappoint. I might note, however, that some of the new features of XI are covered in surprisingly good detail.

As a previous reviewer has noted, many of the implementation examples do not work or work only with considerable tweaking, and the number of development environments that is supported in the examples is somewhat limited.

29 of 34 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Don't buy this book - It is a waste of money, March 17, 2006

By	R. Weight "FisherRon" (Utah) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This book is supposed to be for developers. It's supposed to help you learn how to integrate Crystal XI with your application. DO NOT USE THIS BOOK! It is totally wrong when it comes to telling you how to do it.
Example (pg. 276-277) Explains how to view a report using just a line or two of code. Here's the code: CrystalReportViewer1.ReportSource = "D:\projects\dynselect.rpt"
It says to add this line in the Form_Load subroutine. Even after making sure the path was correct (mine was C:\Test\dynselect.rpt) it DOES NOT WORK! It comes up with an Invalid Cast Exception. You cannot simply pass the ReportSource property a string. It expects something else. I'm not sure what it expects (it looks like it needs a report object passed to it), but the book certainly doesn't have any clue.
This is totally inexcusable and renders the book useless for anyone wanting to integrate reports into their application.

It ignores Visual Basic 6 (which may be OK for some folks, but certainly made me upset - I still use VB6). There is supposed to be a web site that gives more help and resources from the book, but that is a joke as well. It has a single page that says that it will be ready by December 2005. It's way past that now and still nothing there (http://www.crystalxibook.com)

I can not imagine how this book got published when it is just plain wrong. I gave it 1 star only because the information about using Crystal XI is OK as long as you don't plan on using it in your application. Since this book is supposedly for Developers, even 1 star may be too many.

If you want to use Crystal XI to just create reports, not actually use them, then this book may help.
Otherwise, I would skip it and look for something else.

I will be returning this book.

4 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Horrible Book, July 17, 2007

By	J. Lawlor (Los Angeles, CA USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Return this book if you've bought it. I bought a copy of this book without reading deeply into(my mistake) cause it looked like it would be useful. I am a C# developer and need to generate some Crystal reports for the project. When I got the book and started reading/looking up info, I found something startling. All of the Code Examples in the Book are VB. Now this doesn't sound bad if your a VB person, but it included C# Examples that were actually VB Code. This was amazing, I'd never seen a mess up by an editor like this. I returned this when i saw it and got a different book that actually had C# in it. Worst Book ever....