I always mention case sensitivity in my Crystal Reports classes. My normal comment is that CR formula comparisons are case sensitive with the exception of the selection formula, which is usually NOT case sensitive.  I even wrote about this here, last month.  So I was surprised last week in my Advanced class when our formulas ignored all case differences. I thought this might be a recent change so I went home and tested reports back to v8.5. None of the comparisons were case sensitive.

So I did a quick Google search and found a 10 year old forum thread discussing case sensitivity. One short comment in that thread explained the difference. And guess who wrote that comment and promptly forgot about it (Doh!).

So the answer is that there is a setting in Continue Reading »
Case sensitivity in Crystal Reports – revisited.

Crystal limits how many values you have to choose from when you use a dynamic parameter.  The default limit is 1,000.  To show more than 1000 values you have to edit the registry on the PC.

1) Add a new registry entry under:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Business Objects\Suite 11.5\Crystal Reports\DatabaseOptions\

2) Add a new key at that level called: \LOV

3) Add a string called MaxRowsetRecords
4) Set the value to whatever limit you want, or enter a zero to mean unlimited.

Note that loading large lists this way can make the parameter run for a few minutes before the user can select a value. Also note that any dynamic list that has more than 200 values will activate the parameter’s ‘batch interface” discussed in a previous post.

(And thanks to Duane Fenner, an Account Manager and CR developer at LeaseTeam, Inc. for suggesting this post.)

One of my customer sent me two screen shots. One showed a normal preview on his development machine. The other showed a preview window on the runtime machine. The second had the group tree, but the report was nothing but a long blank vertical strip. He had been struggling with it for a month and could not figure out what was causing the strange behavior at runtime.

When the preview behavior changes on a different machine, it is usually due to a printer driver problem. I also know that CR will normally Continue Reading »
Strange printer behavior at runtime

For the past few days I have been helping a customer develop a GANTT style chart in Crystal Reports.  The challenge was that Crystal’s normal Gantt chart doesn’t allow multiple bar segments on the same row.  So I was showing them how to create a GANTT chart using formulas and specially formatted summary fields. This method requires formatting dozens of small fields with the same color condition.

I selected an initial color but was trying to think of the most efficient way to change the color in all the condition formulas on the fly. Before I had an answer the customer showed me a method I had not seen before.  He created a single formula that returned Continue Reading »
Controlling the color of many objects from one formula

Say you have several columns of numbers that get added together like Price, Tax and Shipping. At the end of a customer group you would have three subtotals. You might decide to write a formula that adds those three subtotals together to get the combined total for the customer. It would work fine but there is usually a more efficient way to do this. Instead of writing a formula that combines the subtotals I would write a formula that combines the fields at the detail level. It would look like this: Continue Reading »
A total of a formula instead of a formula of totals.

This week I had a customer who was having trouble getting some version 8.5 reports to run on another another computer using CR v11.  The report wouldn’t connect to a new data source consistently.  So I gave him the following steps that seemed to clear up the problem. Here they are in case someone else has a similar situation.

Any time you need to run a v8.5 report in a later version of CR the first step is to change the version of the RPT.  To do this open the old report Continue Reading »
Running v8.5 reports in later versions of CR

When you specify field values in Crystal Reports formulas do you have to match the case?  Well, it depends on where you are. Take this example:

{Name} = “Joe”

It would only be true when the first letter was upper case and the other two were lower case.    So what if you have values in your data that use different case patterns?  You could get around the problem Continue Reading »
Case sensitivity in Crystal Reports

Last night I had a customer with a strange problem.  Their report ran fine and looked great in preview and when printed.  But if it was exported to PDF it had a long line down the page.  This didn’t happen if it was printed to a PDF driver so the only time it was visible was when using the CR export function.

I opened the PDF and there was a vertical line on every page, even on blank pages, starting near the top.   I opened the RPT and there was no visible object anywhere near the sections at the top where the object should be sitting.  I was getting ready to start deleting objects one at a time to see if it was tied to a specific object, but first I decided to Continue Reading »
Mystery line in PDFs

I had two different customers in the past week ask me why their distinct count grand totals were not totaling correctly. They had distinct count subtotals at the group level and distinct count grand totals at the report level.  But when they added up all the subtotals the sum didn’t match the grand total.  Usually it won’t because of what a distinct count is designed to do.

A distinct count summary will count how many different values there are in a column.   So if I group patient visits by doctor and then want CR to tell me how many different patients each doctor saw in that period, I would use a distinct count at the doctor group level.   And if I also wanted to know how many different patients were seen across ALL doctors I could create another distinct count of the patients and put it in the report footer.  But it is very likely that this grand total is not going to match the sum of the doctor subtotals.  This is because any patient who saw more than one doctor in the period will show up once in each doctor’s group, but then will only be counted only once in the grand total.

If you ever have a requirement where you need the grand total to be the sum of the subtotals you can purchase Expert Techniques volume 1 and read tip 25.

On occasion I have worked with customers where the field explorer has become undocked and we have trouble getting it to dock again.  I also remember clicking toolbar buttons and accidentally dragging the toolbar out of position, then not being sure how to get things back the way they were.  So I was pleased to find a feature (tucked inside a little-used menu item) that will fix these issues.  It is currently available in versions 11 through 14 and I assume that it will be available in later versions as well.

To use this feature go into the VIEW menu and select TOOLBARS.  You will see a window that allows you to control which toolbars are visible. At the bottom is an option called “Reset all toolbars and explorers on the next restart”.  Check this option and then close and re-open Crystal Reports.  All your toolbars will go back to their default positions and your field explorer (and other explorers) will re-dock in their original positions.

Now I would have been even happier if this also reset the entire Formula Workshop.   I have written before about the formula workshop disappearing, or the panels not docking correctly.  Unfortunately these features are not currently reset by this option.  So if  you have these problems in the formula workshop you will still have to dig into the registry to fix them.