Throughout various articles and guides, as well as multiple places on .rpt Inspector Online, you’ll notice we refer to objects, object types, and properties. If you’re not sure yet what those are, you’ve come to the right article. Here we’ll explain just what those terms mean in .rpt Inspector Online.
When you create a Crystal Report, you’ll typically connect it to a database, put a logo and a title on the page header, a page number on the page footer, add a section or two and add some fields (aka table columns) to the design of the report. Maybe you’ll also add some formulas, and to make your report more dynamic maybe you’ll add some parameters too.
All of these items that are now part of your Crystal Report are what we call in a general sense, objects and as the name implies, what we call object types are simply a classification of the type of objects which include:
- Alerts
- Areas
- Data Source Connections
- Database Tables
- Database Table Links
- Formulas
- Groups
- Parameters
- Report Objects (we group boxes, images, lines, and text items here)
- Running Total Fields
- Sections
- Sort Fields
- Special Fields
- SQL Expression Fields
- Sub Reports
- Summary Fields
Each object has values which you can define or manipulate. For example, when you add a title to the page header, a text object is used. The value you would specify for that title, the size selected, the color set, and the font set – are all properties of that object. And so, each object has its own set of properties.
.rpt Inspector Online documentation tools allow you to see a very detailed report of all those objects and their properties while our modification tools (i.e. Change Data Source, Formula editor) allow you to modify them, and our analysis tools allow you to make informed decisions about them (i.e. which fields, formulas, parameters … are used / not used and how changing them or removing them will impact your reports).