Creating Watermarks in Crystal Report

[raghavendra_hullur]

Crystal Reports version:

2008

Scenario:

You might have seen something like “Specimen Copy” in sample question papers for competitive exams, or any other banking exams. Also, you might have seen some Copyright messages in the centre of all pages in grey color.

These are called as watermarks, which allow people to distinguish between specimen copies and original documents. Watermarks are just like background text (or it can be even image also).

Crystal Report allows us to create such watermarks. Below content have more details on this watermark creation in Crystal Report.

Approach:

Create report with database connection and select whatever fields you want to be displayed in report output. In below image, I have created a report showing Order Details.

Figure 1:  Report output with "Order Details" without watermark:

Now, we are ready with our report output, we can proceed with creation of watermark by using below steps.

Create a “Page Header” section (the default Page Header section is already used for displaying field headers for the fields used in the report). Move this section above the other Page Header section using Section Expert as shown in below image. Also, need to select the checkbox related to "Underlay Following Sections" (marked in red circle in the same image).

Figure 2: Adding "Page Header" section and moving it to be first "Page Header" section:

Now, add a text field to the newly created Page Header section with size big enough to cover the page when report output is displayed (this can be adjusted to suite our requirement).  In this case, we are displaying the text “This content is to demonstrate Watermark” for the watermark.

Figure 3: Adding a textbox for watermark:

The text can be changed in terms of font size and font color by selecting the text field and using the color and size properties available under “Format Text” -> "Font" tab. Below image has details for that.

Figure 4: Changing size and color of the text field used for watermark:

P.S: Usually the content used for watermark will be displayed in grey color so as to distinguish it from the report text content.

The text direction of the watermark text can be changed by using “Format Text” ->  “Common“ tab as shown in below screen, here we are trying to display the text 90 degree oriented, so that it’s easily identified compared to other report content.

Figure 5: Changing the display direction for watermark text:

Now preview the report output to check the display of watermark.

Figure 6: Report output with watermark content:

The water mark can be restricted to only display on first page of the report output by using the watermark text field in “Report Header” section instead of “Page Header” section.