| If you're looking to integrate Crystal Reporting-like functionality with Flex, I highly recommend taking a look at ColdFusion Reporting: http://www.adobe.com/products/coldfusion/reporting/ ColdFusion Reporting is done via the ColdFusion Report Builder tool. You can design a report visually, lay out exactly how you want the report to appear, define the repeating areas, the query to pull the data, do calculations, draw lines and charts and images, write ColdFusion expressions to generate dynamic fields, pass data into a report at runtime, etc. The report template file is stored as a .cfr file. Then, you use the tag on the server to display the report in one of three formats: PDF, FlashPaper, or Excel (.xls). If you choose to generate a FlashPaper report, the output is just a .swf file. This report.swf file can then be loaded into Flex via . If you're not familiar wtih FlashPaper, essentially it's a way to bring PDF-style document navigation into the Flash Player. FlashPaper reporting also gives pixel-perfect printing from within the report.swf as well, which is a nice bonus (printing in Flash has traditionally been somewhat difficult to get perfect results). Here's an older example of integrating FlashPaper and Flex (for Flex 1.5): http://blog.daemon.com.au/archives/000315.html For an overview of ColdFusion Reporting to get a feel as to how it compares to Crystal, check out this developer center article: http://www.adobe.com/devnet/coldfusion/articles/reporting.html For an example FlashPaper document, if you've never seen one before, here's an online demo: http://www.adobe.com/products/coldfusion/whitepapers/coldfusionmx7_evaluators_gu\ ide.swf I'm working on an application right now that fully integrates ColdFusion Reporting and Flex 2, and we're loving the way it works together and the final output. It's just what the doctor ordered, and with the tag, we can deliver the report "in-line" via an or let the user download a .pdf for offline viewing, or download an Excel .xls to do more calculations, etc... I hope that helps... -d |
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