Crystal Reports XI

Part 1 of Crystal Reports XL
by: Local reports guru David McAmis takes the new version for a spin.

Most developers might know Crystal Reports from versions included in Studio, Visual Studio.NET, and other popular developer IDE’s such as BEA Workshop, C# Builder, Delphi 2005, JBuilder, WebSphere.


In this latest installment both report and application developers have something to be excited about as there are a host of new features for report design and integration. Here’s a run-down of what you can expect in this release.


Updated Report Designer The first thing developers will notice when they first open the Crystal Reports XI designer is a new user interface. The changes to the UI are apparent from the start, with a new “Start Page” that features links to external resources, sample reports, a list of report wizards, and the most recent reports you have been working with.


The toolbars and icons have also been updated and developers who are familiar with Crystal Reports will notice that when you open multiple reports, a new tabbed interface has been included to allow you to switch quickly between open reports. The report designer also features a new “Project Workbench”, shown below in Figure 1, that you can use to organise reports into projects and publish these reports en-masse to Crystal Reports Server.