Subtitles of the Movie

In this movie you're going to learn an alternate method to connect to a database or data source using Crystal Reports XI. Go ahead and launch Crystal Reports. Once it's up go ahead and click on the New Report icon located in the top left-hand portion of the screen. This will bring up your Standard Report Creating Wizard window. Chances are you're going to see this once you launch on. What we want to do is click on the Create New Connection option. Once you've done that you'll see a whole list of Direct Connects options that come with your installation options once you install Crystal Reports. In our case we're going to choose Access /Excel DAO, and we're going to choose Make a New Connection. This will pop up an additional connection window where we need to define the database type in this case, it's going to be Access, and the database name. Now here you can either type in the database name complete with path or click on the button over here to the right with the three dots, also known as the Browse Icon. From here you find your database. You can either search through your Windows drive or network location to find the one that you need. In this case I've stored it in a folder on my C drive called CRXI for Beginners. Go ahead and choose it. As you can see the whole path now is populating this box here, telling Crystal exactly where to find the database, what type, and how to connect. Go ahead and click Finish, and this appears. We now have a direct connection to our data source. We have all the tables, views, stored procedures that we need. Now, my Crystal does provide many, many options, most large data space rely primarily on ODBC connections, so your Oracles, your DB2s, your Sybases; if you're going to use Crystal the most common and efficient way is to use an ODBC driver. There is some debate on which is faster, a direct connect or ODBC driver, but really it comes down to database size and how much data you're actually pulling. Six on one side, half a dozen on another in some cases, ODBC is faster. You can choose, while working through the tutorial and creating your own Crystal Reports during the training which works best for you. So let's go ahead and try this out a little bit. Go ahead and click on Tables, choose any table. In this case I'm going to choose Customer Table. Go ahead and hit Next. This next window shows us what fields we're allowed to pull in. Now, we've only pulled one table so it goes to say that the only fields we can pull belong to this table. Now there are many ways to get these fields to display. You can highlight them individually and press the single arrow button to the right. You can physically highlight one and drag it over. You can also double-click, and if you make a mistake you can do the same thing back; highlight and Remove. If you need to remove them all you can use the double arrow to the left and remove them all. Also, if you need to see them all, double arrow to the right will do this. Now let's say, oops, I really don't want to do that. We simply, again, go down to the double arrow to the left and undo what we've done. In this case I'm just going to choose some fields that I want to see as a sample. Now in this case we're just giving a sample so we're not going to finish all the windows, but go ahead and click Finish. As you can see, Crystal directly connected to the database and pulled back the field from this table that we chose. Now, some people like to argue that a Direct Connection is faster than an ODBC connection; it really depends on your system and the size of the database more than any type of connection via ODBC or Direct. In some cases there are some benefits and those tend to be system-specific, so you may need to experiment a little and find what works best for your system, either ODBC or a Direct Connect if available.