VB.NET + Crystal Report = True?

I'm making a VB.NET application that needs to generate a number of different reports. The customer is already using Crystal Report and is happy with that so the plan is to integrate with that.

What I basically want to do is:

• Manually create template(s) in crystal report
• User selects type of report in application
• User filters the data according to his wishes
• Crystal Report is opened with the relevant template and values from the application inserted
• User can then review the data, create PDFs and print the reports.

My questions are:

• Is this doable at all in a simple way(quite a low budget project)? Are there any good tutorials?
• I d开发者_如何学Con't want Crystal Report to communicate directly with the database but a number of calculations needs to be done in the VB.NET code. Do I need to prepare the data in some special way?
• Can I include the Crystal Report templates inside the application and extract them when the report needs to be created?

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Visual Studio does come with Crystal Reports functionality "in the box" (and has done since Visual Studio.Net) - you can use that to create your Crystal Reports, which by default will be embedded as a resource, if included in a project. It is possible also to load external files as well, though.

It's probably worth taking a look at the samples that use the Crystal Report viewer, as they will show that most of what you're asking is covered...