I'm working on a large project at a large company to replatform a VB6 application to .NET.  The application is used to schedule production of many different products on many production lines.  Each production line can produce many different products throughout a day, but only one product at a time.

 

The VB6 application uses a reporting tool by Data Dynamics called Active Reports, but we would like to use Crystal Reports for the new application since that is our corporate standard.  However, we are having difficulty reproducing a very important report that graphically depicts the production schedule.

 

The report looks similar to a Gantt Chart with each production line having a single distinct row (Y-axis), and time of day on the X-axis.  However, since each production line can produce several products throughout a day, there needs to be separate "schedule bars" for each production line (side-by-side throughout the day).  These schedule bars may be short or long depending on when production starts and ends, and there may be gaps between them (see next post).  From what I can tell, Gantt Charts are limitted to only one schedule bar per row, right?

 

The way this report was achieved in Active Reports was to programatically format (left property and width property) a shape object (box) for every production record in the schedule next to the corresponding production line.  So far, this aproach doesn't seem to be an option in the standard Crystal Reports control that is included in Visual Studio 2008.  Is this a limitation of the standard edition, or of Crystal Reports in general?

 

Any help on this would be very much appreciated.