Hi guys

This is the 2nd part of my experiences with SAP Crystal Reports for Visual Studio. I’ve posted about installing & creating a simple Crystal Report earlier, if you haven’t read it yet, please find it here.

One of the major confusions around passing values to a Crystal Report was contributed by multiple questions and answers available on StackOverFlow. The ones which came nearest to my requirements had only “teasers”, not real solutions! Finally on the 3rd or 4th day, I realized that, the parameters were called based on the index numbers and the finding the index numbers for parameters were as simple as counting the 1st parameter as “0” & incrementing the index number with 1 for subsequent parameters.

Example Scenario:

I am using a stored procedure with the crystal report that accepts more than 1 parameter to select data from different tables

Here with this example, I am trying to list the salaries for employees based on the year, month & company section in which they are working as filters. An end user will pick up those filters from a web form and pass to the crystal report before the final report is generated.

Crystal report has a very simple method to pass the parameters & I am limiting this post to “Stored Procedure” based reports. The same should apply to table/dataset based reports as well until you have sub-reports involved.

In this example, you could see that I have @pProcessYear, @pProcessMonth & @pProcessSection as parameters for the report. Notice the order they are listed (refer the picture)

@pProcessYear is listed first, followed by @pProcessMonth & @pProcessSection. So the index number for @pProcessYear is 0 and @pProcessMonth is 1 & @pProcessSection is 2!

Now, let us see how we will pass values to these parameters from a WebForm.

using CrystalDecisions.CrystalReports.Engine;
using CrystalDecisions.Shared;
using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Web;
using System.Web.UI;
using System.Web.UI.WebControls;
using Table = CrystalDecisions.CrystalReports.Engine.Table;

namespace insert_demo
{
    public partial class ShowEmp : System.Web.UI.Page
    {
        protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
        {
            if (!IsPostBack)
            {
                ReportDocument reportDocument = new ReportDocument();
                reportDocument.Load(Server.MapPath(@"~/CrystalReport2.rpt"));
                reportDocument.SetParameterValue(0, 2020);
                reportDocument.SetParameterValue(1, 1);
                reportDocument.SetParameterValue(2, 3);

                reportDocument.DataSourceConnections[0].SetConnection("RAJESH-PC", "MenaSS", true);
                CrystalReportViewer1.ReportSource = reportDocument;

            }
        }
	}
}

Notice the intellisense suggestion for Crystal Reports document parameter. Definitely “ReportDocument.SetParameterValue” expects an integer value for the index, when much of the examples available with StackOverFlow were passing report parameter names in the place of index, which didn’t work at all. I am forced to believe, Crystal Reports used to accept this for previous versions of Crystal Reports for Visual Studio & may be not many are using Crystal Reports with Visual Studio anymore…? Interestingly most of the questions related to the subject were many years old.

So, it is as simple is going through the order of the parameters as they are listed on the report design form (the order never changes, unless you delete and recreate them), starting with the index number 0 for the first parameter, increase by 1 until the last parameter & pass the values accordingly & you are done!

With my next post, I will try to talk about sub-reports and complex formatting using available Crystal Report tools.

regards,

rajesh