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Crystal Reports XI: Beginner Tutorials
Create a Basic Report / Data Connections pt. 1 - ODBC
Subtitles of the Movie (Crystal Reports XI: Beginner / Create a Basic Report / Data Connections pt. 1 - ODBC)
In this movie you're going to learn how to set up an ODBC driver. ODBC stands for Open Data Base Connectivity and is what Crystal uses to connect to virtually any data source out there. In order to locate your ODBC, go to your Start Menu, Control Panel, Administrative Tools, and you should find an icon called Data Sources with ODCB in parentheses. Now, my PC's on Windows Vista, but if you're on Windows XP 2000 or even NT this pretty much hasn't changed. Control Panel, Administrative Tools, Data Sources, ODBC. Go ahead and double-click that icon. After you double-click the icon the Data Source Administrator window pops up and you should be on a tab called User DSN. In some cases you may need your Administrator to either set up your ODBC or grant you access so you could, at a minimum, set up your own user data connections. Go ahead and click Add. In the next window, Create a New Data Source window, you see a list of pre-installed drivers that come with your machine. Now Microsoft being Microsoft pretty much all of its products are already included. If you have an Oracle or a DB2 or another third party vendor data base software you'll need to contact that vendor for the latest or the needed ODCB driver so you can have it installed in this list for you to choose. In this case our test database is going to be an Access database, so we'll go ahead and choose Access Driver. Once it's highlighted click Finish and it asks for a Data Source Name, and we're going to call this CRYSTAL TRAINING. The name here is pretty much so you can identify it out of a list and can be anything you want. As long as you can identify it you're in good hands. The description gives you a little bit longer and little more field room to play with. Again, whatever you feel you need. Now in this case we need to choose our database, and our database is the Test Database that came with the coursework you should have downloaded. I put it in a folder called C VTC Training, and there it is. Now, this ODCB connection knows exactly where to go, knows what type and exactly where the data will be found. Go ahead and press OK. As we can see our Crystal Training has been set up. Go ahead and press OK, and that's it. ODCB is a tricky kind of thing. It's one of those things you do only once and then forget about until you get a new PC or a brand new system, so it's kind of worth writing down because if you forget and you get a new PC and you turn to go run your reports or create new reports you'll find that you'll have quite a difficulty. So let me show you what we've done. Open up Crystal Reports and go ahead and click on the New Report icon, the blank page. In this case we're going to create a new connection. Go down till you find ODBC with RDO in parentheses. By trying to uncollapse that file icon it pops up the ODBC Selection window with a list of all the databases that we saw in the previous screen when we were setting up ours. Go ahead and highlight CRYSTAL TRAINING, hit Next. In this case our database doesn't have a user ID and password authentication so we can leave it off. Some databases require a user ID and a password to even connect. It's probably a good idea if you kind of leave it blank because if you put it in here then it's programmed permanently in the report and if your password ever changes it's kind of a pain to go back and switch. Go ahead and click Finish. From there, there's our CRYSTAL TRAINING that we set up, the ODBC and all the tables, views, and stored procedures that are available to us to use. Let me give you a quick test. We'll go ahead and click on Customer, we pull that table in, we hit the Next button and here we have all the fields that are available to us. We can choose one at a time, just a few, any ones we see fit. In this case, let's choose all of them. Now there's a couple more steps here but for simplicity's sake we're just going to click Finish. Observe what happens here. It creates a report and basically dumps everything that was sitting in that table back at us. Now this is a small table so we don't have too much to worry about, but we all did it because we set up our ODCB connections ahead of time.
Tutorial Information
| Course: | Crystal Reports XI: Beginner |
| Author: | Kurt Dunlap |
| SKU: | 33966 |
| ISBN: | 1-935320-29-7 |
| Release Date: | 2009-02-10 |
| Duration: | 6.5 hrs / 95 lessons |
| Work Files: |
Yes |
| Captions: | No |
| Compatibility: |
Vista/XP/2000, OS X, Linux QuickTime 7, Flash 8 |
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