The Crystal Reports® Underground

I had surgery on Friday 12/18.  Nothing serious, but I knew that I wouldn’t be able to shovel any snow for a week or so after my surgery. So I intentionally scheduled the procedure before winter snow was likely to be serious.  Heavy snow isn’t common in Virginia in mid-December   Well, as many of you know, this area was hit with a record setting snowfall that started Friday night.  Here is a shot of the snow piled up on my deck.  I think the table (or the “birthday cake” according to my kids) is about 18″ deep.  Fortunately the driveway is  ‘only’ at about 13″.

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Added 2/6/2010:

We got another one, and this one is literally twice as deep as the one above.  It may be the all time record snowstorm for many areas here.  I shoveled  three times today while it was snowing and was able to bring the driveway down from 22 inches to about 4 inches but it was still coming down when I quit.

Our deck is even deeper than last time, with a 27″  birthday cake.  The funny part is the hand rail you see behind it.  This is only a few inches wide yet it has a 20″ wedge of snow balanced on it, making little walls on 2 sides of the deck.

Have you ever noticed that some parameters include a small toolbar below the List of Values (LOV) drop down?  This toolbar has two scroll arrows on either side of a small drop down list and two buttons with funnels on them.  The toolbar doesn’t show up very often so it took me quite a while to figure out where it comes from and what it is supposed to do.  So this article is for anyone else out there who is puzzled.

This is a called the batch interface.  It is included in Crystal versions 11 and 12 and appears automatically whenever there are more than 200 values in the parameter list (LOV).  To make the long list easier to navigate Crystal automatically batches the values into
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Using the parameter “batch” interface toolbar

If you need to pull a single character out of a character string, or a single item out of an array, you can use a subscript to identify the position you want like this:

{Customer.Customer Name} [3]

This example starts counting from the left to identify the third character or element.  Over the years I have had people tell me you could use a negative number
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Using negative subscripts

If you need to buy an older version of Crystal Reports, all the way back to v8.5, you can now download them directly from BO (for $595).  This link includes all versions from 8.5 forward.

If you want to save a few bucks you can check on Ebay, where I regularly find older versions for sale.  Just make sure you know what you are purchasing.  In 2002 I wrote an article about what to look for when buying CR on Ebay.  That article still applies, although some of the product codes listed might be different in newer versions.

Or check with me.  I sometimes know of extra copies that are available.

Surfing Gecko is the company behind a popular Crystal Reports viewer known as Crystal Ease.  Crystal Ease is a simple viewer that allows your users to run, print, export and refresh Crystal Reports without having to install the full Crystal Reports designer.  It supports Crystal versions up to XI and even allows you to tweak the select expert at runtime.  But the biggest selling point for Crystal Ease is now the price, especially if you are looking at more than 10 users.  That is because they have recently started offering an unlimited license for only $149.   And now my readers can get an additional discount of $20 for
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Surfing Gecko offers “all you can eat” viewer for $129

I recently stumbled on an article on the site “Joel on Software” that I found interesting.  He lists 12 questions to help you rate the quality of a software team.  It is in response to what he considers the overly complex, time consuming methods that are often used to try and measure quality.   I thought some of you would find it interesting.

I recently was rereading some Tek-Tips.com FAQs and spotted a FAQ by synapsevampire that I didn’t remember.  It had to do with creating a combined list of detail values that can print as a single string.  I have a formula for this on my site, but it happens WhilePrintingRecords, which means you can only display the combined values at the bottom of the report.  With this method you populate an array during the WhileReadingRecords step of report processing.  Because this array is complete before printing starts it can be
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Building arrays WhileReadingRecords

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.

I recently wrote a blog post to remind developers that you can’t integrate CR into a VB.NET application if you are using the .NET Express Edition.   So I was surprised when a developer wrote to me that he was using the Express Edition to run my sample apps.  These are simple apps that I created for my guide to Crystal Reports in VB.NET.  He said VB wouldn’t let him add a the CrystalReportViewer control onto a form, but if the control was already there he could use it.  He then used the free runtime files
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Using Crystal Reports in VB.NET Express Edition

Have you ever copied a group of objects and then pasted them to another section or another report?  When you click “paste” you only see one of the objects on your cursor and the rest appear when you click on the page.  So which object is the one you see first? The one on the right? The left?  So you guess and select a spot for that object (oops), click undo, try again (oops), etc.  Wouldn’t it be nice to know exactly which object is on your cursor so you know how to align the group?  Or even better, wouldn’t it be nice to select this “cursor” object at the time of the copy?

The same challenge comes up
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Selecting multiple objects (to copy or align)