I've had no problems using the Crystal Reports Viewer for the most part. Recently though, I'm having problems with a "large data report".

My VB.NET code is pulling two tables from a database and dumping it to a DataSet. Table one has around 4000 items, and table two has around 16000. Filling the DataSet takes about 1 second.

Now I have controls in place to filter the selection down to more reasonable numbers, and when you do this, there isn't an issue. The problem is, a customer using our software might decide to "show all records".

The report takes approximately 4 minutes to bring to screen in this case. I can't seem to implement a cursor change to a wait-state because the code to load up and display the report seems to be handled asynchronously and thus, my subroutine ends; yet the application is locked until the damned report comes up.

Also, there's no Abort button; i.e. a "Sorry, I'm an idiot for trying to make you paginate through 260 pages of report! I'd like to stop and narrow my selection now without having to forcibly kill the application."

Does anyone have any suggestions for how to handle such a beast? Is there a way to make the thing abort? Or only bring up pages on demand? Or bring up the first page, but background fill the remaining pages (where you can't go to another page until it gets done)? Or a way to implement a progress bar or even have the mouse show a Wait Cursor? Anything that'll free up my UI thread.

I'm using the version of CR that comes with VB2k8 Pro by the way if that helps.

Any help would be most appreciated.