Conceptually using two dimensional barcode fonts with Crystal Report is no different than using other fonts. In practice, there are a couple of issues need to work out. The major issue associated is the length limit imposed by Crystal Reports: no formula field can have more than 255 characters.

To add PDF417 barcodes in Crystal Report, you will need to use Morovia 2D Fontware UFL. Native Crystal Reports formula is not supported.

Note: the method described in this article are based on Morovia PDF417 Fontware V3.0. The UFL library is not compatible with earlier versions.

This tutorial will guide users through the creation of a web application from start to finish, using the newly released Crystal Reports for Eclipse product to provide a high quality presentation layer with literally zero-coding from the developer. As time permits, users will also be guided through the process of migrating the solution to a full BI solution, enabling scheduling, integrated security, load balancing and fault-tolerance. No previous experience with Crystal Reports is required, however a basic understanding of web development is a pre-requisite

Most databases are accessed through ODBC, and you will need to set up an ODBC driver before you can report from your database. In this tutorial, we are going to set up an ODBC driver for the sample Access database that ships with Crystal Reports 10 and then use it to create a report.

If you have to create a report in Crystal Reports from multiple data sources or provide multiple views of the data, you may find sticky situations because CR does not allow you to have multiple Detail sections in a single report. For example, say you have to display data from two tables on the same report page. Now say, you create two Detail sections and bind each Detail section with a table, you will find second table records repeating within the first table records.

If you generate a report from a database command, XML document, or XML schema, and add a chart to the report, CR generates chart and legends automatically. In legends, it adds the table column names, which you select to get the data from.

If you use ADO.NET DataSet document (XML or .xsd files), the legend names would look like DataTableName.ColumnName for all columns you are using in the chart. Now if you want to change this default legend's text, you are out of luck. At least I wasn't able to figure it out.

After spending half a day, I gave up and came up with couple of workarounds. One was, being a GDI+ expert, I could create my own graphics which looks like legends. Alternatively, the easy approach was, create a box and color is what color your chart bars are and put a text box side by side with the name of the column. For example, if your database column names are Column1, Column2 and Column3 but you want your data legend names Fall, Summer, and Winter, you create three boxes with the color of chart bars and put TextBox with text Fall, Summer, and Winter.