There are many ways to deploy Crystal Reports to users.  I normally lean toward the simpler and less expensive options, like locally installed viewers.  But there are environments where a server based option is necessary.  The ‘official’ options from SAP are Crystal Reports Server and BO Enterprise.  You can read about these on the SAP website under the heading “SAP Business Objects portfolio”.  But there are other products out there that most users never see. These are third party products that also allow you to centrally manage your report deployment from your server.  The list includes:

Ripplestone – Traditional portal
rePORTAL - Traditional portal
ReCrystallize Pro – Web Launch page generator.
Universal Report Server (URS) – Server-based scheduling engine
Report Launch – Bridge between BO server products and server based applications.

The products vary widely and are aimed at Continue Reading »
Server based options for Deploying Crystal Reports

There is a link on my library page that explains how to enhance the mapping feature in Crystal reports to include maps by zip code or county.  Unfortunately, adding these features isn’t free.  You have to purchase additional map ‘layers’ for the MapInfo module in CR.  MapInfo is now part of Pitney Bowes.

One of my readers, Robert Meyer, just let me know that he called Pitney Bowes and found that my pricing information was out of date. They used to sell zip codes and county maps one state at a time.  A zip code map for a single state was $395 for one user.  Now you can get a zip code map for all 50 states for $2,250 (still one user).  Not that this is cheap but it is much better than before.   A county map used to be $125 per state per user and it is now $495 for all 50 states.

If you export two reports to PDF and want to merge them into one, or combine them with other PDF files, you might want to look at a free tool I just discovered called PDFsam.  This isn’t a trial version of something but a free open source tool.  I tried it recently when I needed a way to merge a Word doc and a Spreadsheet into a single PDF, rotating the Spreadsheet 90 degrees in the process.

Whenever available, I usually opt for “free open source software” (FOSS).  Software that is open source means that it was developed by a volunteer team that provides the source code for their application for free. Not only do you know it is free but it makes it much less likely that someone will try to include malicious code.   If you want to see what is available in FOSS you should check out SourceForge.net, one of the most reliable sources for FOSS.

If the chart feature in Crystal Reports don’t quite do what you want, you might want to upgrade your charting engine to CR Chart. CR Chart is sold by Three D Graphics. And since Three D Graphics makes the current Crystal Reports charting engine, you know that the upgrade is fully compatible. You just replace one DLL with an upgraded DLL.

So what does CR Chart allow you to do? You get to use new chart types that aren’t currently in CR, like BoxPlots, Pareto Charts and Waterfall Charts. You can change chart properties dynamically at runtime and even add programmable reference lines and labels to your charts.

And as a special offer to my readers, you can save 25% on your purchase Continue Reading »
Exclusive discount on CR Chart

One of my readers who uses Clarion as a development platform has been struggling with an upgrade to CR 2008 for several weeks.  He was upgrading from v8.5 to CR 2008 (v12) and we found that some reports that would run fine in CR 8.5 would not run in CR 2008.  We narrowed it down to reports that had more than 2 tables so I figured it was a problem with the SQL syntax and sure enough, v8.5 uses a different syntax for these reports.  We tried downloading the latest TPS ODBC driver and it didn’t help.

So I contacted a colleague Continue Reading »
Clarion/Topspeed ODBC fails in CR 2008 and CR XI (solved)

When I started my newsletter in 2001 one of my first issues focused on Crystal Reports viewer programs. And because I think this topic is important, I launched this blog 3 years ago with a first post about viewers. I write about them regularly and yet I still find people who don’t know about viewers, or who think that all viewers are as useless as the ‘official’ viewer put out by SAP. Some of these viewers do really cool things and most are inexpensive (or free). So if you have users who need to preview, refresh, print or export reports without having CR installed, you should check out the “viewers” section of my LINKS page.

This LINKS page also contains other Crystal-related utilities, 50 products in all. It is one of the most popular pages on my site. Here are some of the other things you can do using these tools:

Email each page of a report to a different person.
Automatically run reports at 2am every morning and Email the output. Continue Reading »
3rd Party Utilities

In the Library on my site I have two guides for developers who need to integrate Crystal Reports into Applications:

Quick Reference to Crystal Reports in VB
Quick Reference to Crystal Reports in VB.NET

These show developers the basics of getting an application to launch and interact with a report. I have had several developers ask me why the steps wouldn’t work in their applications.  Both were using the “Express” edition of VB.NET.  Acccording to Microsoft, the Express edition doesn’t support Crystal Reports integration (all the other editions do).  So, I have now noted this on the product page  for VB.NET and hope this saves a bit of grief for developers who struggle and wonder why their apps don’t work.

Creating Crystal Reports from PeachTree accounting data has become a specialty of mine.  But getting data out of PeachTree has always been something of a challenge because the only way to access the data has been using the proprietary Btrieve query enginge rather than the more standard SQL method.  But I just helped a customer upgrade their reports to PeachTree 2010 and was pleased to see that this latest version of PeachTree now accesses the data using OLEDB instead of Btrieve.

Since OLEDB is SQL based, this means Continue Reading »
PeachTree finally allows SQL (OLEDB)

For those of you who do VB development, there are several choices for creating an installation file. The main commercial tools are InstallShield and Wise, but there is also a free tool (donations accepted) called Inno Setup, by Jordan Russell.

For those of you that create VB applications incorporating Crystal Reports, you should check out Inno Setup. One of the main advantages (besides being free) is that you can use a great little script generator for Inno Setup called InnoScript by Randem Systems.  InnoScript isn’t free but is a great deal for $25.

InnoScript is designed for VB developers and generates complete Inno Setup scripts directly from the VB project file. Best if all, InnoScript now provides full and automatic support for Crystal Reports versions 8.5 thru 11(XI). Randem Systems even maintains an archive of the Crystal redistributable files. You can download the correct Merge Modules in an installable MSI format. To quote Will Fastie, a freelance IT management consultant:

“This is a brilliant piece of work that is available nowhere else, at least as far as I know. I’m using this system now. Flawless.”

And thanks to Will for pointing out these tools.

There is a new viewer available from Origin Software and the developer is looking for people to try it and provide feedback. The product is called the Crystal iViewer. All new users get a 45 day free trial of the full version of the software. If you decide not to purchase it after 45 days it, downgrades automatically to the ‘free’ version. This means you lose refresh capability and a few other features. Along with the ability to run reports without Crystal Reports installed you can also: Continue Reading »
New free viewer looking for user feedback