The Crystal Reports UFL is free to use with one of IDAutomation's licensed barcode fonts. This UFL is designed to work with Crystal Reports 7.0 and above. It is also compatible with the version of Crystal Reports that is distributed with Visual Studio .NET and the implementation is the same as described in this tutorial. The UFL plug-in is supplied in an easy to install executable file. Once installed, barcode functions appear in the formula editor. These functions can be easily applied to fields on reports that require barcodes.

Crystal Reports for Visual Studio.NET is a great tool for creating professional-looking reports in the .NET platform. This tool allows you to host your reports in a Windows Application, in a Web Application, and to publish reports like Web Services. It has a rich programming model. It was built using the framework of Crystal Reports 8.0, but has been modified for the .NET platform to give us the richest API possible and has open and flexible architecture to allow you to share reports on the Web.

Using Crystal Reports for Visual Studio .NET, you can create very complex reports. The Crystal Report Designer allows you to create and format the report you need without coding. The Report Engine processes all the formatting, grouping, and charting criteria that you specify when you design the report.

• QuickBooks is a flat file database. Having an ODBC driver will not change it to a relational database. For this reason, relating more than several tables will begin to severely degrade performance; there are no indexes. This issue will be addressed in future versions of  the Intuit SDK and QODBC.
• QODBC acts as a 'wrapper' around the Intuit SDK so customers can finally get at their data using standard database tools; without having to learn the SDK. For Crystal Reports this is the only method of retrieving QuickBooks data.

• Use filters; in particular date ranges whenever possible

• Use only the fields you need when using sp_reports

The WebSphere Commerce report framework is a well-designed and extendable framework that allows you to develop reports quickly and conveniently. At times you may need reports in a visual format, for example, a diagram instead of a table. In this situation, a Crystal Report is the ideal tool to develop, preview, and deploy such a report. By taking advantage of both of these tools, you can benefit from the extensibility of the report framework and the visibility of a Crystal Report at the same time. This tutorial shows how to use an embedded Crystal Report plug-in to develop a visual operational report under the report framework in a WebSphere Commerce integrated development environment.

Use Crystal Reports to create reports across the Internet using

• Page-On-Demand Technology
  Page-on-demand report access lets users download only the specific report pages they need to see, improving response times and reducing Web traffic. Placeholders and partial page technology allow users to view report pages and data on the Web immediately, without having to wait for the processing of large objects.