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Walkthrough: Data Bound Reports
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User Guide > Samples and Walkthroughs > Walkthroughs > Standard Edition Walkthroughs > Basic > Walkthrough: Data Bound Reports

Glossary Item Box

In ActiveReports, the simplest reporting style is a tabular listing of fields from a record source.

This walkthrough illustrates the basics of setting up bound reports by introducing the ideas of using the DataSource icon and connecting textbox controls to the data source through the DataField property.

The walkthrough is split up into the following activities:

To complete the walkthrough, you must have access to the Northwind database.
A copy is located at C:\Program Files\Data Dynamics\ActiveReports for .NET 3.0\Data\NWIND.MDB.

When you have finished this walkthrough, you will have a report that looks similar to the following.

Creating a new Visual Studio project

To create a new Visual Studio project

  1. Open Visual Studio.

  2. From the File menu, select New > Project.

  3. Select the project type and click Windows Application.
  4. Change the name of your project and click OK.

Adding an ActiveReport to the Visual Studio project

To add an ActiveReport to your project

  1. From the Project menu, select Add New Item.
  2. Select ActiveReports 3.0 File and rename the file rptBound.
  3. Click Open.

Connecting the data source to a database

To connect the data source to a database

  1. Click the gray report DataSource icon in the Detail section to open the report Datasource dialog.
  2. Select the "OLE DB" tab.
  3. Click Build.
  4. Select "Microsoft Jet 4.0 OLE DB Provider" and click Next.
  5. Click the ellipsis button to browse for the access path to the Northwind database. Click Open once you have selected the appropriate access path.
  6. Click OK to continue.
  7. In the Query field, type "Select * from products."
  8. Click OK to return to the report design surface.

Adding controls to contain data

To add controls to contain data

  1. In the Report Explorer, expand the Fields node, then the Bound node. Drag the following fields onto the detail section and set the properties of each textbox as indicated.

    Field Text Location Size
    ProductName  Product Name 0, 0 2.3, 0.19
    QuantityPerUnit Quantity  2.38, 0 1.55, 0.19
    UnitsInStock Stock  4, 0 1, 0.19
  2. Set the CanShrink property of the detail section to True to eliminate white space in the rendered report.

Viewing the report

To view the report

  1. Add the ActiveReports viewer control to a Windows Form.
  2. Add the code needed to set the viewer document equal to the report document. See Using the ActiveReports Windows Form Viewer for help.
To enable the viewer's copy button, add references to the RtfExport and TextExport dlls.
You can quickly view your report at design time by clicking the Preview tab at the bottom of the designer.

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