recommendations on deployment type and export report content to MS outlook

[Former Member]

Hi All,

I am a new user of Crystal Reports and need some advice on which deployment type (Component or Server) to use. And based on that which SDK to use.

I have a .Net web application developed in VS2008.

I wish to integrate reporting, apply parameters to the report, view report.

The most important requirement is to be able send the report out as the content of an e-mail in MS Outlook (not as an attachment).

I downloaded a trial version of Crystal Reports 2008 and according to my Visual Studio Integration Manager, I am pointing to Crystal Reports 2008(12.0).

So far I've managed to create a report, send in parameters via my c# code behind, view report and export it to a P D F. However our business users do not want an attachment in the distribution e-mail. They want to be able to see report in the e-mail. I was hoping that I would be able to capture the HTML content generated, and use this as the content of my e-mail - but it looses its formatting. I think because some CSS is being generated on the fly, and there is no access to the CSS when I put content in an e-mail.

So my understanding is that my current set up is a 'Component Deployment'.

Is it possible to export the report as e-mail content using this set up?

Or do I need to use a 'Server Deployment' such as Crystal Reports Server 2008.

And do I need the Cyrstal Reports Server 2008 Add-on 'Live Office'.

And as I mentioned above if anyone could give me help on which SDK to use that would be great as well.

Thanks,

Sinead

[former_member184995]

Is it possible to export the report as e-mail content using this set up?

No, we do not export as email content at all.

Or do I need to use a 'Server Deployment' such as Crystal Reports Server 2008.

You do not need to use CR Server since it does not export as email content either

And do I need the Cyrstal Reports Server 2008 Add-on 'Live Office'.

No, you do not need to use live office

If you use CR 2008 along with VS 2008 then you can try one of two things that I can think of

1) You can export the data to xml and then parse that xml and do whatever you want with it.

I have attached a simple sample that shows how to export to an xml like format.

2) You can output the data using inprocess RAS and use the rowset controller to output the data in memory and then parse it and do whatever.

Jason

[Former Member]

Thankyou for the very helpful post. I will download the attached sample and see if I can make it work for me.

Thanks again,

Sinead

[Former Member]

Update:

In the end I returned to exporting to html using ....

System.IO.MemoryStream oStream = (System.IO.MemoryStream)repDoc.ExportToStream(ExportFormatType.HTML40);

I realised that the html was fine and that the issue lay with how the html is validated in MS Outlook 2007 (which now validates the html against Word standards rather than IE ...or some such).

So then convert the html to an image.