Can Crystal Reports be edited in a .Net Windows interface?

Question

I am currently evaluating Crystal Reports 2008 for use within a major enterprise project. I have successfully used Crystal Reports Basic within Visual Studio, but we want more functionality. Can these reports be edited in a .Net Windows interface?

Reports will be produced based on ADO.NET Xml datasets and will be saved to a SQL Server db as blobs of the rpt files. We will be retrieving these rpt files for viewing within a .Net Windows application coded using Visual Studio 2008 in C#.

I need to produce letters that hide and show sections/paragraphs based on formulae, but the users want to be able to edit the text.

Once a report has been created and is being displayed within the .Net CrystalReportViewer control (inside a .Net Windows application), is there any way I could permit the user to alter the displayed text and re-save the rpt file?

I know that I can use parameters, but it's not ideal for large paragraphs of text which may include some words in bold for example. The users are only likely to be changing a few words, such as the addressee of the letter. They have insisted that they need to be able to change anything on the letter.

I also know that (with Crystal XI or 2008) I can export to EditableRTF which does not put the text in frames like the standard RichTextFormat export option. The .Net RichTextBox component does not show headers or footers, which is a pain. I can show the RTFs in Word (even though they miss out lines and boxes from the report, but that's another matter) but quite frankly I'm terrified of the stories of deploying Office interop components in .Net apps.

When Crystal displays a report in preview mode you can click on pararaphs and it knows that there is a 'field' there because it highlights the row(s) with a box. Is there any way we can just edit this text and save the report again?

I'm under pressure to produce an estimate for this area of work. Is it possible within Crystal?

Answer 1

You've got a really good handle on the capabilities of Crystal, and you're right - the idea of editing big chunks of report text "live" is going to be tough.

The "export to RTF" option might be workable, provided you can live with one-way generation (after you use Crystal to generate the report and start editing the output, you can't re-generate without losing your edits).

Have you considered something like OneNote or other XSLT-based solutions? It seems like your users want a lot of control over the generated output, so your design's going to have to factor that in. Maybe even generate output and then shoot it straight into a document management system so users' changes are tracked and controlled?