Deploying Reports
-
What is the best practice for deploying Crystal reports documents with a WinForms app? I understand how to deploy the modules and runtime executables, my question is about the actual documents themselves. I was thinking of deploying them with the application in a reports folder accessed using System.Reflection, but is there a better way or is this pretty much the best bet?
-
What is the best practice for deploying Crystal reports documents with a WinForms app? I understand how to deploy the modules and runtime executables, my question is about the actual documents themselves. I was thinking of deploying them with the application in a reports folder accessed using System.Reflection, but is there a better way or is this pretty much the best bet?
I've worked with a few enterprise software packages that use Crystal Reports. The most common way to do it seems to be just like you've described... drop the report files in a Reports folder along with the other application files. From there, using a relative path combined with the execution path would be the most flexible. I've also seen a software system that allowed you to check-in/check-out reports from the database. Not only was this used to capture metadata about the reports but also to store them in a database instead of the standard file structure. I think it really boils down to whether or not you want the reports to be accessible (easily) or not and if you'll be having user functions within the app to manipulate the reports (e.g. adding new ones).