Crystal Reports data source in another project in my solution?

Question

I would like to create a Crystal Reports report using pre-existing LINQ classes that live in a different project than where the report lives. I can not find a way to do this. I am using VS2008.

Whenever I expand the Project Data tree, I only see classes in the current project. The History tree shows me the last 5 classes in the OTHER project, but I need more than those 5. I found the Create a new connection option in the ADO.NET section, but it looks like it is looking for XML sources and DLLs.

Answer 1

Perhaps you can hack all the necessary tables in the report. History information is read from xml files on disk. Usually they are in "C: \ Documents and Settings {UserName} \ My Documents \ History". Here you will find the last five connections. I have not tried this, but maybe you can customize your first five classes, add the necessary tables and save the report and close VStudio. Then edit the xml files to point to the desired classes, and then reopen the solution. Go to the Databse Expert and you should have a new five connection history. Then you can add the necessary tables to the existing report.
The FYI registry setting "HKCU \ Business Objects \ Suite 11.5 \ Crystal Reports \ Crystal Data Source History" provides the location of the history files.

Answer 2

I don’t know if this is related or not, but I have a similar problem with Visual Studio ReportBuilder reports (.rdlc). It happens that when I create a report, my data source from other projects does not appear in the data sources window. What I have to do is hilighting the project in the research project where the data sources are located. Only after that I can select data sources from another project.

Answer 3

I am using Crystal Reports 13.0 and Visual Studio 2010. I was able to manually set up the data source by creating a new ADO.NET (XML) connection. When the dialog box appears, there is a place to enter the class name, and I just need to enter the full namespace and class name.

Answer 4

Steps - Add a CR report to a project containing existing Linq classes - Database Expert → Project Data → .NET Objects: right-click → Refresh - Go back to the report you are working on. - Open the database expert: classes should be there.

Note. In my case, 2 projects are in the same solution.