The Crystal Reports Underground

As I mentioned last month, the promotional price of Crystal Reports Server XI was a clear indication that CR Server 2008 was about to be released. The official release of Crystal Reports Server 2008 came on 7/16 and there is a 30 day free trial now available on the Business Objects web site.

The main improvement
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Crystal Reports Server 2008 (& prices)

A customer recently asked me to adapt formula 17 on my site so that they could add business hours or minutes instead of just business days. In their example they wanted to add 90 minutes to a DateTime value when a case was opened. If the DateTime was within 90 minutes of the end of the workday, they wanted to skip time when the shop was closed and pick up the 90 minutes the next business morning. So a case the opened at 4pm on Friday would be due 90 “work minutes” later, at 9:30 am on Monday. They had a 9-5 workday. They also wanted to skip holidays.

So below is my adaptation of formula 17
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Adding Business Hours/Minutes to a Start DateTime

If you are used to searching the Business objects KB for CR technical info you will need to look in a new place. SAP, the new owners of Business objects, has incorporated the BO Support information (including Crystal Reports) into the SAP Support system. All links to the old support pages are forwarded to the new system’s front page, so if you have links to specific documents or KB articles, these will have to be updated.

The new location has forums, a Wiki, and other things that I haven’t really looked at yet. If you check it out and find anything interesting, let me know.

Update - according to this article, it isn’t just the KB that was moved, but the entire BO Support system, (including all support tickets) has been moved. The author of the article says that transition isn’t going very smoothly.

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. (There are a dozen independent viewers that allow refreshing and many other features.) So Gordon tested the BO viewer 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.

Update - it was changed as of 7/14.

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 which is no longer available.  I found the same steps in a Forum Article that seem to be the same thing.

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.

Note that if you are on CR v8.5 you may need an updated copy of u2fsepv.dll. I think the minimum version of this DLL that supports this method is 8.6.2.475. If you can’t find the DLL I can help there as well.

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.

To install Cute PDF you must download both the writer and the converter on the left of the page.

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