Crystal Reports Question
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I am writing a series of reports (accessing SQL Srv 2K backend) need to incorperate these Crystal Reports into a Demo for a very important Client tomorrow morning. Does anyone have any Idea what is the best way to make the Crystal reports have a Web Access Look And Feel ? I am not a Crystal Reports developer so be gentle...
Thanks for Any Assistance!
Jim Babington
Jbabington
Jbabington@hotmail.com -
If you're talking about deploying them over the web, that's a bit complicated with Crystal (from a licensing standpoint as well). You should be able export the report to an HTML format though, and it looks pretty good. Give that a try.
Hope that helps!
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James,
What I need to do is make the Crystal reports Mimic the look and Feel of a Full Application essentially. That is the target... When Mr. Bigwig see's the Reports he feels as though it is a full Application...By the way nice name!
Thanks For the response !
Jim Babington
Jbabington
Jbabington@hotmail.com -
Oh, well in that case, you should be able to make the report a standalone .exe. You should still have access to the export capabilities. If you have time, you could use the ocx or the Crystal capabilities in VS.NET. In any event, good luck.
Yeah, the name is kind of unforgetable, isn't it
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Ahh, you are at a very pivitol point...the Begining! This is also the most important point when Developing Reports...coming up with the Strategy.
A couple of years ago, I started playing with Crystal 8. Hated it, super slow! So, I started studying and found that ADO Recordsets could be passed to the Report. What I also discovered was that if you allow Crystal Reports to touch your Database (by developing them through Connections in the Crystal IDE) Crystal sometimes needs to pass through the whole data (even Records that do not match your Criteria) 2 or even 3 times depending upon the complexity of the Report!!!
Good god, what happens when you have a huge table!??Anyway, after studying for a while, I discovered the fastest, easiest way for Developing Crystal Reports that is now used by every Report Developer in my company. With this, we can crank out most reports in about 30 min to 1 hour. You can get one working in about 5 minutes, and then tweak it until your happy.
The idea is this:
1.) Generate a Data Definition File (in Crystal 8) or an XML Schema (for Crystal 9x).
2.) Once the Schema is generated, Create a new Report, and using the "More Data Sources..." / "Data Definition Only" option, Bind the Report to the Schema File.
3.) Now that the Report is bound, add some fields (no need to make it pretty yet). Have a sample program which retrieves the data from SQL Server, Access, or whatever, and pass that data into the Report. Crystal will now use that instead of a Database as the DataSource for the Report.
4.) Make the Report pretty and keep testing it.
5.) Once done, use the same strategy to integrate the Reports into your Application (either by including the Reports into the EXE, or by External Files). By far, external files are best (IMO)
.And if your skeptical, let me just add that Reports that used to take 15min to run, now only take 2min (Ok, they were huge querying millions of records)!
I have also developed 2 programs (one for Crystal 8, and one for Crystal 9.2) which we use here as a sample app to get reports running quickly. The apps Generate Schema, and then help Preview the Report. If you email me and ask nicely, I can probably email the Source Code (they're not anything complicated).
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Quick - find another job...
Without a doubt, Crystal Reports is the biggest piece of crap foisted off on developers. Crystal 9 routinely locks up on my server, and routinely crashes on my development boxes. I have started writing my reports directly in HTML. I only hope that they go out of business soon.
Steven J. Ackerman
ACS, Sarasota, FL
Kindest Regards,Steven J. Ackerman
Consultant
ACS, Sarasota, FL
http://www.acscontrol.com
http://spaces.msn.com/sjackerman -
Well, since the Crystal Reports requirement was not made by me (Client requested) I have little or no choice to alter the development tool at this time. However the meeting went well with the client I created about 4 screens (reports) and just saved them and showed the access points and functionality as requested. However I utilized a direct DB conection... Created a few Proc's and got great performance considering the hardware limits (Laptop). Thanks for all the great input from everyone... Normally I post to people that need help..nice to get the responses on the "other end"
Thanks much all!
Jbabington
Jbabington@hotmail.com -
Hi, tymberwyld. I was using the way you mentioned to create the crystal reports. However, that is because our database is not in a mainstream one. So I have to query the db with their provided OLEDB library to return a dataset as the datasource.
Howevery, I always got a lot troubles to publish the crystal reports on the web. Since it was vs.net just out and it was crystal 9 at that time, so how do you think about the crystal report on the web with asp.net now? Is it just straight away and how is it transformed to a pdf file?
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Well, I'm sorry but I can't help you there. Due to Licensing, we've never been able to Develop any Crystal Reports for the Web. At one point, my company almost went that route, but it was determined not to even be worth it.
I've been slowly studying SQL Server Reporting Services but I've been hearing that the Clients always have a hard time to Print since there is no inherant viewer, only a Web Browser that displays Reports in HTML.
I am thinking (beyong my wishes to only use one product) that maybe I could develop some Web Reports using Reporting Services, but if a Client were running my Windows App, I could simply use the Crystal Report and send it to the Printer (using the API / Object Model).
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