Hi Trent,

I am about to start working on some reports for my 1st SF project, for now I will used the free version of Report SharpShooter and honestly I have no idea where to start even to create the report and use the BBS with it.

Do you think you guys could put together a simple quick sample report in StrataFlix using Report SharpShooter?

You already included 3 reports using MS report, but I am really stuck on this and would like to use Report SharpShooter instead.

Edhy Rijo

I'd be happy to, Ross.  It is actually pretty simple in concept and once you get it implemented within your environment it is simple in use as well.  This has turned out to be a wonderful solution for us and it makes it very simple to modify and redistribute reports.

Here are the elements:

1. You will need to create a report designer within your application that uses the run-time designer components of Report Sharp-Shooter.  This allows you and your users (if you choose) to design the reports within the application at run-time instead of within the VS IDE.
2. You will need to create your report structures that will house your reports, templates, style sheets (if you elect to use them, I would recommend it), and the serialized report data.  The report data is just a child of a report, but it is always a good idea to separate the data into another table as this is where the bulk of the size will be and will make loading up BOs, tree-views, etc. faster and you only retrieve the serialized report template when you are deigning it or running the report.
3. You will create the data sources used within the run-time designer within the VS IDE.  So these will be static.  We use reflection to populate our designer at run-time with the data source that we want the report to use.  So when we launch the designer within our report designer, we create the data source object by setting the DataSources programmatically to an instance of the data source selectedWe set the style sheets, masgter pages, etc. the same way (prior to loading the designer).
4. You can just use the standard BinaryFormatter class to serialize the data to and from the reporting database.
5. Finally, the basic structure that is shown in StrataFlix in regards to the ReportDataSource, etc. is what we use in our medical software, just modified a bit to support the data driven reports.  But the design of the data sources will be the same.