Crystal Reports and the Web Part 2

Here I am 7 hours later and I have been pretty good today to focus on the issue at hand. Deploying crystal reports to my web server. I had to learn .net from almost scratch cause I have never used it before.

I did it. Got it working. If I had to do it over again, I could do it alot quicker. I hope these notes will benefit somebody.

My Setup:
Dell Lattitude D820 Windows Vista Business
Server: Windows 2003 (Hosted)

1. Install Visual Studio 2005. I got a free 90 day trial from Microsoft. After today I am almost positive I will buy it. Seriously, The time I saved on this one project will pay for the $700 or so that it costs. Without it I could have spent week(s). In fact I did spend several days without success last year on this.
2. Installed SP1 for Visual Studio
3. Installed SP1 Update for Visual Studio for Windows Vista(I first tried to install just this file, but come to find out you need the main Service Pack installed first.
4. Installed SP2 for MSSQL Server Express
5. Then I found the tutorial here: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms225276(VS.80).aspx
6. I followed the developer link.
7. Next I clicked on the link "Persisting the ReportDocument Object Model Using Session" This seems a little strange, I know but it has a good step by step tutorial which I followed.
8. You will notice all the resources on the left under the Crystal Reports heading. 80% of the information I found was from this MSDN site.
9. Some search results from the MSDN Site: http://search.msdn.microsoft.com/search/Default.aspx?brand=msdn&locale=en-us&query=crystal+reports
10. One thing I got sidetracked on was installing IIS on my laptop (Dev Machine) That is unnecessary. Visual Studio has a development web server built in. The way I found to use it was to right click on the "default.aspx" file in the solution explorer and choose "View in Web Browser". This starts the devel0pment web server and lets you view the page.
11. The tutorial was detailed enough that I didn't really stumble to much in that section.
12. On the server side I had a few problems. Yesterday I had installed Crystal Reports XI SP 2. This, I think is unnecessary. I didn't uninstall it since I already had it, but the key to making it work on the server was downloading this file: http://support.businessobjects.com/communityCS/FilesAndUpdates/crXIr2_net_server_install.zip.asp
13. The page with the link to that file is here: http://support.businessobjects.com/downloads/merge_modules.asp#06
14. I used this download: "Crystal Reports XI Release 2 for Visual Studio .NET Server Install - This file contains the Server Install file for Crystal Reports XI Release 2 for Visual Studio .NET."
15. That worked great, after I installed that on my server, it was working.
16. The only problem left was the icons on the toolbar for the crystal report viewer are not showing up. I will troubleshoot that later.
17. I created a simple test report with no datasources and just a little text to test it and it worked.
18. Other Helpful links:
19. http://www.businessobjects.com/products/dev_zone/net/2005.asp
20. http://www.businessobjects.com/global/pdf/dev_zone/VS2005_Walkthroughs.pdf
21. http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms225593(VS.80).aspx
22. There was alot of talk about building an msi installation package. I played with that in different sorts of ways until I finally found the server install package listed above. I think that if you just install that, you won't need to try and package the crystal report stuff, you get them from that install.

Monday I work on passing parameters and programatically outputting to .pdf. And I have to figure out why the toolbar icons don't show up.

Dave