The Crystal Reports Underground

I have updated my course books to cover the new features of Crystal Reports 2008. So if you are using this newest version of Crystal, and are looking to have on-site training, I can help. The new features include interactive parameters, sort controls and inserting calculated rows and columns into cross-tabs. I also have a full review of new features in CR 2008.

There are now 2 editions of my courseware. The new edition covers versions 9 through 12 while the older edition covers versions 6 - 8.5. If you are looking for reasonably priced courseware you can read more about what makes my books different.

Gordon Portanier of Crystalize recently sent me a note about a promotional page for Crystal Reports Viewer that talks about the ability to refresh reports. That surprised him because (as my readers know) the official viewer released by BO is the ONLY viewer out there that does NOT allow you to refresh the report’s data. So he tested it and found that it still does not allow refresh, despite the clear wording of the ad, which currently starts with the title:

“Open, View & Refresh a Crystal Report Instantly.”

I expect it to be changed soon, assuming it is an error. If it is not changed soon then it could be BO intentionally trying to confuse (and annoy) their users.

Traditionally, a CSV file would not be expected to have field or column headings on the first row. But this has been a requirement in a number of environments that I have worked in. Providing this has been a challenge until recently. In most Crystal environment, a CSV export would take every visible object on the page and make it into a column. The last column is often a column of ones, created from the page number in the page footer.

Up through CRvXI release 1 it was possible to get column headings to print as the first row of the CSV export, but it was a complicated process. It involved modifying the report, installing a special driver and even tweaking the registry settings for Crystal Reports. The steps are outlined in knowledge base article c2014451.

If this is a regular requirement in your environment, then you should seriously consider an upgrade to XIr2 or CR 2008 (also known as versions 11.5 and 12). I just noticed that the CSV export in these versions has a new check mark asking if you want to ‘isolate’ the Page Headers. If you check this property the values of the page header become the first row of the CSV export.

Say you have 2 group levels in your report Customer and Product. You have subtotals at the end of each group, so you have 2 levels of subtotals. What do you do if you want to have a page break after each product? Your first attempt would be to simply go into the section expert for GF2 and check “New Page After”. This works fine except for the last product in each Customer. The Customer’s subtotals would end up printing on the top of the next page, which would be a different Customer’s page. So you add
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Cascading page breaks (on Interior Groups)

I just found a handy link that lists all of the “Free Trial” software available from the Business Objects web site. You can download trials for both CRXI (v11) and CR 2008 (v12), although you do have to register to get the download and key. These are fully functional versions that can be used for 30 days. They can then be converted to full licenses by using a key from purchased software.

Every once in a while I have found that Exporting from Crystal Reports to PDF doesn’t look as good as the printout. In those cases I might not use the Crystal built in Export function, but instead will use one of the free PDF printer drivers that are available. My current favorites are PDF Creator and Cute PDF.

These tools, once installed, behave like a new printer on your computer. You select this faux printer and print the report as you normally would. It converts the output of the report (or document or spreadsheet) into a PDF file. PDF Creator is open source and works with all Microsoft operating systems except for Vista. Cute PDF is free but is not open source. I use it currently on Vista.

Download both the writer and the converter on the left.

Starting with Crystal Reports version 11.5 (also known as XI r2) there are several tool bar buttons that can be made “sticky”. This means you can double click the button to make it stay on until you turn it off. This is especially handy if you are using the Format Painter, because it allows you to format many objects at once, without having to re-click the tool bar button in between.

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“Sticky” Buttons for the Format Painter and other controls

Last year I published the “Expert’s Guide to SQL Expressions, Options and Commands“, just as CR 12 was coming out. In the Guide I explained the workaround for passing multi-value parameters to SQL Commands. Up until today I had missed a new (but little noticed) feature of CR 12. Commands parameters in CR 12 have a new option that allows multi-value parameters. No workaround needed. And, because you can launch stored procedures from a command object, you can now pass true multi-value parameters directly to your stored procedures.

You will see this feature at the bottom of the window when you add a new parameter to a Command. However, if you are using versions 9 - 11 you will not have this feature.

Crystal will allow you to conditionally suppress a Page Footer. But even when the section is suppressed, the space it would have taken up is still there, reserved as blank space at the bottom of the page. This is because other features like ‘can grow’ and “keep group together” make the job of determining the page size very complex.

There is a related option for page footers called “reserve minimum space” but this only applies
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Conditional Page Footer

I was creating a report for a customer that had provided a spreadsheet as a data source and noticed something very odd in the Field Explorer. There was only one table but the field tree had several nodes that could be collapsed and expanded, with several fields in each node. After a bit of searching I found anarticle article on the BO website that describes this behavior.  Apparently this feature was added to XI release 2. 

If you have a dash in your field names and 2 fields start with the same characters up to the dash then Crystal will put those fields under a node.  So if your fields were like this:

Address1-City
Address1-State
Address1-Zip

There would be a node called Address1 with 3 fields below it. Not sure I would have ever thought to add dashes to field names but if you start seeing nodes in your field tree you will at least know why they are there.