Most of reports, as a rule, are based on data from DB. For accessing such data, Delphi offers effective mechanisms, which are used in FastReport. The matter concerns the "TTable" and "TQuery" components, which can act as data sources for the report. Generally, for this aim you can use any components, i.e. TDataSet successors.

In addition to possibility to access data defined in the project, FastReport allows to create new components in run-time. In FastReport the principles of components’ creation for data access are approximated to those used in Delphi environment as much as possible. As well as in Delphi, a component is put on the form and its properties are set in the object inspector. Component ideology is very flexible: you can create new components to support different data access engines easily.