Success! I just wanted to share with everyone -

After much effort, I am now successfully running Reports against Entities instead of TypedLists. There are some huge benefits to this:

• Calculated Fields are coming through from my Entities! This now fully supports some of the very complex Calculated Fields that I have... Total fields can calculate 3-4 relations deep, even based on business rules. No more pain of adding columns to TypedLists (which has significant limitations).
• Greatly simplifies the formulas needed in my Reports.
• In-Memory Entities can be used; User can modify the Entities & Re-Run Reports without ever going back to the database.
• Selecting Entities: I created an ExportEntityManager which manages the Entities & EntityCollections used to create the DataSet. So, I can simply traverse the Entity graph & just do myExportManager.Add(myEntity) and/or myExportManager.Add(myCollection)... and get very specific about what Entities get put in the report. Very nice to work with. Perhaps some of you are already doing this. But I've been creating Reports using TypedLists for 2 years now, and it drove me nuts! This is so much better

Hope this gives you some new inspiration today -

Ryan D. Hatch

Thanks for the feedback. If you want to share some code (maybe a project example), we can host it in the examples section or 3rd party downloads.

Good luck.

Update: I now have all Relations for my DataSet being generated automatically from the Entities in-memory. So CrystalReports can now automatically follow your EntityRelations.

Ryan

Cool