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Crystal Reports Tools: Improve Performance While Saving Time and Money |
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Crystal Reports Basics: SectionsThis is based on the book, Crystal Reports: A Beginner’s Guide. For more detail and explanation, plus practice exercises, order the book here. A Crystal Report consists of several sections: page header, page footer, group header, group footer, details, and any kind of custom section you want to create and insert. You can have a Header A and a Header B, where B is the alternate based on some condition. For example, you can do invoice reports, where A thanks the customer for the order and B asks the customer to make good on an overdue account. Or, suppose you have regional offices. Based on recipient zip code, you can have Crystal Reports insert the correct header (A, B, C, D, and so on) for the regional office that handles that zip code. Footers could include seasonal wishes or greetings, based on the time of year. If you want to get a bit fancy, you can position sections side by side for a conditional columnar layout. Sections add enormous functionality to Crystal Reports—the items above are merely the tip of the iceberg. For even more functionality, you can use third-party programs, such as the ones available here. If you think through your report design carefully, sections can make a huge difference in how useful the reports are. It is probably worthwhile to do A/B testing. Create two versions of a Crystal Report, each with a different footer. Send out both, and ask users to vote on which they like better. Then go with the one that is more popular. Some report designers put in every possible variation and delete based on user reaction. Don't use this approach. You want your reports to make a good impression. You want them clean, not cluttered. You want to avoid a situation in which you are irritating users and then backing off until the complaints die down. You want compliments from the very start. You can use multiple sections. You can merge sections and you can split sections. Obviously, you can create them. But you can also delete them. You can use the Section Expert to create some examples, but it's best to wean yourself off the Section Expert as soon as possible. Once you get a good understanding of sections and some things you can do with them, you'll find they make your life easier as a Crystal Reports designer. But do think about sections strategically and come up with your own style guide for using them. Otherwise, you will have inconsistencies across your reporting system. Standardize and re-use, wherever possible. Here's something on a somewhat related note, to get you thinking about sections, headers, and footers. The footers can be especially useful, so think in terms of what business needs the information there can help serve. Here's a neat trick: print an index in the page footer. On the bottom of each page, a user wanted to print an identifier of the first and last item on the page (e.g. "Adam to Brian","Bruce to Callum", etc.). Sounds tough, doesn't it? But it was easier than you might think, with the simple use of a variable. A formula in the Page Header: WhilePrintingRecords; stringvar First:={table.field} A Formula in the Page Footer: WhilePrintingRecords; stringvar First Print the table.field in the report footer to show the final value for the page. Be aware, this technique can only be used on the page footer. The page header cannot identify the item at the bottom of the page.
This article is copyrighted by Crystalkeen, Mindconnection, and Chelsea Technologies Ltd. It may be freely copied and distributed as long as the original copyright is displayed and no modifications are made to this material. Extracts are permitted. The names Crystal Reports and Seagate Info are trademarks owned by Business Objects. |
