Legacy Terminology

This new version of the documentation for Crystal Reports for Visual Studio strives to adopt clear terminology and use concepts that represent the object-oriented structure of Crystal Reports for Visual Studio.

The guiding principle has been to choose the more explicit, less ambiguous term when possible.

The following terms have been changed in this version of the documentation:

Legacy term
Usage in previous documentation
New term
Usage in current documentation
Windows Form Viewer, Winform Viewer, Web Forms Viewer, Webform Viewer
The generic term "Viewer" prefixed a variety of adjectives, to distinguish between the Web and Windows versions of this control.
CrystalReportViewer control
Refers to the viewer explicitly by its control/class name, CrystalReportViewer* in all situations, because the Windows and Web versions of the control are very similar.

* When referring to the parts viewer or mobile viewer, the specific control and class names CrystalReportsPartsViewer and MobileCrystalReportsPartsViewer are used.

Viewer object model
The generic term "Viewer" referred to the limited object model that is contained within the CrystalReportViewer control.
CrystalReportViewer object model
Refers to the limited object model in the CrystalReportViewer control, by the control and class name, because this class is the entry point into the object model.
Engine object model
The generic term "Engine" referred to the full object model provided with the Crystal Reports SDK. This name was chosen because it referred to the namespace that contained the classes of this object model.
ReportDocument object model
Refers to the full object model by the ReportDocument class name, because this class is the entry point into the object model.

(All embedded reports are represented by a report wrapper class that inherits from ReportDocument. All non-embedded reports are loaded into a ReportDocument instance by means of its Load() method.)

Strongly-typed report, Untyped report
The term "strongly-typed report" was the former term used to refer to reports that are created or imported into a Visual Studio Windows project. Adding a report to the Windows project generates a wrapper class for this report, which provides early-binding.
Embedded report
Reports created or imported into the project are primarily referred to as embedded reports.

Reports external to the project are primarily referred to as non-embedded reports.

Both embedded and non-embedded reports are accessed through the ReportDocument object model: the embedded report is accessed through its early-binding report wrapper class that inherits from ReportDocument, and the non-embedded report is accessed by its late-binding ReportDocument class, which loads the report into the ReportDocument instance at runtime.

However, although the binding technique is different between embedded and non-embedded reports, there is little difference between the reports themselves. Both embedded and non-embedded reports are accessed through the ReportDocument object model and have full access to the classes of that object model.