Mertech’s new Flex2Crystal product allows seamless integration of new Crystal Reports versions with Visual DataFlex and allows developers to continue using their existing reports.
New Crystal Report versions use ADO.NET (ActiveX Data Objects for .NET), which is a set of software components for accessing and modifying data stored in relational databases and non-relational database sources, including web pages, spreadsheets, and other types of documents. ADO.NET allows developers access to user-defined or application in-memory data.
The key components of ADO.NET are the DataSet Schema and the Data Source:
The Mertech XSD Generator tool facilitates creating XML Schema Definitions (XSDs), which are required in the ADO.NET environment.
An empty table grid is initially displayed upon launching the tool or when creating a new XSD file within the tool. This table grid allows you to define the layout of your data source by entering the name, the type, and (for strings) the size of fields in the data source in the corresponding columns on each row of the grid:
The XSD Generator then creates an XML schema from your entries, formatted to follow the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) proposed XSD language:
The XSD Generator Tool also allows you to convert Crystal Data Object (CDO) data definitions (which are stored in a TTX file for the in-memory structure) from TTX files to XSD files. Like ADO.NET, the Crystal Data Object (CDO) is an ActiveX data source that allows for on-the-fly generated data sets to be used inside a report. Support for CDOs is still provided by Flex2Crystal for backwards compatibility; however the use of CDOs is considered a legacy implementation. ADO.NET is the replacement for CDO.