ObjectStore Active Toolkit Tutorial

Chapter 5 Using Crystal Reports with ATK

Introduction

Reporting functionality is a typical application requirement, but most commonly used reporting tools are designed to run against relational databases. ATK, however, lets you easily build tabular views of the data in an ObjectStore database using most common report generating tools, including Crystal Reports.

Crystal Reports, and other ODBC consumer applications, can access ATK's OLE DB interface through ISG Navigator. This capability enables you to add reporting functionality to your ObjectStore application.

Software resources

To complete this tutorial, you need the following software resources:


Resource	Where to Find It
Database	\odi\ATK6.0\Examples\demodbs\ carsdemo.db
Crystal Reports Version 4.x or later	Seagate Software at http://www.seagate.com/

In this chapter

In this chapter, you create a data view that you can use with any reporting tool. Then, you use Crystal Reports to create a report. This chapter contains these sample exercises:


Exercise	Description
Create a Data View for the Report	Create and customize a data view that provides access to specific data items.
Create a Report Using Crystal Reports	Using the Crystal Reports wizard, create a report that displays data from the fields in the data view.

Create a Data View for the Report

Process

Specify the data that is available for the report. To do so, follow these steps:

Create a new data view.

Customize the data view.

Save the data view.

1 Create a new data view.

Start Inspector.

Open the carsdemo.db database.

Double-click on the vehicle root in the Database Roots pane.

Select Data View | Create. This data view displays a collection of vehicles:

2 Customize the data view.

Modify the Vehicle class instance format to display owner information for each vehicle.

Right-click anywhere in the data view.

Select Set Format of Class.

Expand the owner relationship.

On the Instance Format sheet of the Instance Format dialog box, double-click on the name and address data members in the Customer class.

Click OK. For each vehicle, Inspector traverses pointers to display the owner name and address in the new instance format:

3 Save the data view.

Select File | Save.

Name the data view VEHICLES.

Select File | Save All.

Create a Report Using Crystal Reports

Overview

Using the ObjectStore Active Toolkit OLE DB provider and ISG Navigator, you can access an ObjectStore database from any ODBC consumer application.

Process

To do this, follow these steps:

Start the Report Wizard.

Create the report.

Group the report data by year.

Preview the report.

1 Start the Report Wizard.

Start Crystal Reports.

Select File | New.

The Create New Report dialog box appears.

Click Standard to start the Crystal Reports wizard.

Click SQL/ODBC. The Create Report Expert dialog box appears:

Click the SQL/ODBC tool.

From the list of available data sources, choose
ODBC-ODIATKDEMO.

Select the VEHICLES data view, which you defined in Inspector.

If the data view is not listed, verify that Inspector is saving its metaknowledge in the same place from which ATK is loading it. Refer to Chapter 4, Configuring ATK, in the ObjectStore Active Toolkit Reference.

Click Add.

Click Done.