Need Reporting Help Badly

Software: Visual Studio .NET 2008 Professional
Language: VB.NET

I use what I believe is considered a typed dataset, but since I'm not positive, I will explain a little bit. My data comes from an MS Access database from which I draw in information and populate datatables within a dataset. I do not use any of the drag-and-drop services within Visual Studio for handling data.

With that said, I am having a horrible time trying to get any sort of reporting to work. The two reports I need are incredibly simple in theory but are causing a lot of unnecessary stress. Report1 will be a simple query to display all the contents of one table. Report2 will display all fields of one record (ie: SELECT * FROM Database WHERE ID = "Blah").

I have considered running the report from within Access but I do not want to require my users to have Access. I have tried Crystal Reports and Microsoft Report Viewer as well, but they all seem to lean towards using the tools within Visual Studio and have little help for typed datasets (or whatever I use).

I have even tried to create a form and use text-boxes and labels to display the information and print the form. This would have worked if only the information would fit in one small area, but sometimes the information is pages long and/or has scrolling text-box areas in a situation like this.

I am nearing the end of this project and have spent far to much time stressing over this small, yet very important part of the big picture. So this is a cry for help from anyone who knows the best way (in your opinion) to go about this and may possibly not mind helping me with some of the code if/when necessary.

Thank you in advance,

Minolwen

Please, if anyone has any ideas I would appreciate them.

Hi just trying to figure out what you want to do exactly. Do you want to create 2 different reports but you dont want to use the databse expert in Crystal Reports VB 2008?

If this is the case:

Create a report using a command, here you specify your sql query string, then you design your report from the command you created.

At run time can set the Reports datasource to a new sql querie.

That is correct, I want to design two different reports without using the setup tools within Visual Studio.

Quote:

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Create a report using a command, here you specify your sql query string, then you design your report from the command you created.

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I understand the concept here as it is very simple. I guess what I do not understand is what am I creating the report from? Perhaps a sample snippet of code would better explain?