The Crystal Reports® Underground

Crystal Reports 2025 was released for purchase recently, but wasn’t available for a free trial download at that time.  As of today, Crystal Reports 2025 is available as a free trial.    If you are looking for what is different in Crystal Reports 2025 vs 2020, you can check out the “What’s New” page.

I haven’t touched my comparison of alternative reporting tools in a long time. This year I am adding two new reporting tools to the comparison: Clear Reports by iNet and CxReports by Codaxy. I have a separate article describing Clear Reports, which is very similar to Crystal.

CxReports takes a different approach. They use a page based layout approach (similar to SSRS) as opposed to the banded approach used by Crystal. The basis for each reports is a SQL query (or a script that combines SQL queries).  Calculated expressions are also done in the SQL query. Beyond creating the SQL, the GUI is designed for end users rather than developers. There are reusable themes and templates that allow consistent headers and footers across reports. The settings for each report are stored in an open format (JSON) file.

CxReports is designed as a SAAS tool, but it can be purchased and run locally on Windows or Linux, using Docker.  Pricing is tied to volume-based tiers, with more expensive tiers allowing for more users, more reports and more generated PDFs. Scheduling and automatic Email report delivery are included at all levels, subject to volume limits at each tier.

For a more detailed feature comparison you can download the feature matrix in the comparison article.

I was recently asked to do a project converting some Crystal Reports to iNet Clear Reports.  The customer assured me that the Clear Reports designer was very similar to Crystal Reports, and he was correct.  During the project I had no trouble finding my way around the Clear Reports menu.  The formula language is also virtually the same allowing me to copy and paste formulas directly from Crystal to Clear.  Below are the most important differences I found so far. I have also added Clear Reports to my comparison of alternative reporting tools which provides a more detailed feature comparison.

Note: The comments below are based on version 21, which this customer uses.  The latest version is 24 and may have improvements over 21.

Major disappointments:

• You can’t make modifications in preview. You must make all changes on the design tab. Every time you go back to the design tab you will have to refresh to preview.
• You can’t save the report with data. This is one of my favorite Crystal features, allowing me to work off line.
• All summaries are created as named objects, similar to Crystal running totals. When you create them you can determine if they behave as running totals or normal summaries.
• In Crystal you could copy a row of subtotals and past them into the report footer to make the same row of grand totals, because summary fields in Crystal are relative to the section containing them. You can’t do that with the named summaries in iNet.
• None of the third party software in Crystal Reports’ ecosystem will work with iNet.

Minor annoyances:

• You can’t drag multiple fields from the field explorer to the report design area. You must drag them out one at a time.
• When you drag an object from the field explorer there is no visible object outline to guide your placement. The object outline IS there when you move an object, but not when you first bring it out from the field explorer.
• The record count does not display in the status bar of the preview screen.
• iNet has a format painter (paintbrush) toolbar button, but you can’t make it “sticky” so a format can be applied to multiple fields by clicking on them in turn. You must click the paint brush again every time you want to apply it.

Other differences:

• iNet is licensed by server and the designer is free.
• iNet will run on Linux as well as Windows.
• iNet shows a real-time list of ‘problems’ (formula errors, unused fields, etc)
• iNet shows the data-type of all fields in the field explorer, not just database fields

Crystal Reports 2025 is now available for purchase from SAP. The cost is the same: $495 for a full license and $295 for an upgrade. Normally, SAP offers a trial download of the products they are selling, but there is no trial download for CR 2025. You can still download a trial of CR 2020 or CR 2016.

I won’t be upgrading to 2025 in the near future. I have worked with CR 2020 with several customers but I have not installed it in my own environment. I still prefer using the 32-bit CR 2016, which is also still being sold. The main reason is that I am not yet ready to give up the legacy connection options available on the 32-bit platform.

If you are interested in what is new you can look at this SAP article.  Most of the new features are for users at the enterprise level.

I often work with large and complex reports. Sometimes making a minor change can have unexpected consequences. I like to be able to see that the only things that changed are the things I intended to change. My simple approach to this is described in this article.

R-tag has created a more sophisticated version of this process with their Unit Testing module.  It allows you to create a set of parameters and a validated output file (image, a PDF, a spreadsheet, etc.) for those parameters.  The parameter combinations are called theories, and the validated output file are called golden files.

After you make changes to the report, the data or the environment,  you can run a unit test for that theory.  The software will generate a new output file using the theory parameters, and will automatically compare that file with the golden file, listing all of the differences.  You can create multiple theories for each report with different different parameter combinations. You can then run the unit tests manually (e.g. right after a database update) or on a schedule.

My simple approach will only find values that change, but the unit testing feature can compare the output as two images, which will pick up formatting differences as well as data changes.

R-tag has a demonstration video here.

There is a chance that Crystal Reports 2025 will be released next week on 3/12/2025.  I just viewed an SAP community page that mentions Crystal Reports 2025. The only problem is that page points to an article that focuses on SAP BI 2025 and doesn’t specifically mention Crystal Reports 2025 anywhere. I guess we will know more next week. SAP has always been cagey about new versions of Crystal Reports.

You should also check out the rest of this “new” community page. I say “new” because it is new to me.  It looks like it has been around for about a year without me noticing it. The good news is that most of it doesn’t require you to have an SAP account ID.

This page lets you download the install media for every version of Crystal reports for the past 20 years (including Crystal Reports XI from 2005). Yes, you still have to have a license key to complete the installs, but this is great for when computers crash and you lose your install files.

This page also has links to trial versions of Crystal Reports, SAP generated sample reports and lots of how-to guides (formulas, charts, etc).

And thanks to Gordon Portanier of Crystalize in Canada for sharing the link.

I have written lots of articles about the rotation issue with Crystal Reports and Zebra printers. Apparently it can still crop up since I just helped a customer with this issue.  They installed the drivers from Seagull Scientific which usually solves the problem.  But in this case, once they had the drivers installed, the problem didn’t go away.  But after they re-calibrated the printer to the label media, the issue went away for them.  I am sharing the steps just in case this comes up for anyone else. These are the steps for the Zebra GK420d desktop printer:

1) Holding the feed button down
2) Wait until it blinks once, then blinks twice in quick succession.
3) Immediately release the button
4) It will automatically print out a few labels or so to figure out the dimensions.

(and thanks to Samuel Lindemulder of Kentwood Powder Coat for sharing these steps.)

When Crystal Reports 2011 came out, SAP also introduced Crystal Reports for Enterprise (CR4E).  The two products would be parallel but:

“SAP Crystal Reports for Enterprise is the foundation for all future releases of Crystal Reports.”

At that time most users were simply happy that the stand-alone version wasn’t being abandoned.

But CR4E never caught up with Crystal Reports (in features or usage).  According to an article I just discovered, CR4E is finally being allowed to sunset.  They are now providing instructions on how to migrate back to Crystal Reports from CR4E.

One of my customers uses Crystal Reports 2016 and wanted to buy more licenses. I recommended that they purchase licenses of Crystal Reports 2016 to keep all the environments the same. Crystal Reports 2016 is the last version that is 32-bit ODBC drivers. Crystal 2020 uses 64 bit ODBC drivers.

The customer then sent me a link showing that CR 2016 support is reaching “End of Life”.

The link says that “mainstream maintenance” ended in 2022 and “Priority One support” ends this December. They asked if this was cause for concern and I answered that it wasn’t. Few of my customers have ever needed SAP support. Many of them use even older ‘unsupported’ versions of Crystal. A few still use v8.5 from 2001, so I still have that installed on my system. The lack of SAP support has never been an issue. I haven’t upgraded to CR 2020 yet because I don’t want to recreate all my local connectivity. Also, it is interesting to note that SAP still sells CR 2016.

But, if you do need to upgrade to CR 2020 it isn’t usually a big deal. It causes the most work when users are connecting using Crystal’s DAO drivers to connect to spreadsheets and text files. There are no DAO drivers in CR 2020 so you have to connect using 64 bit ODBC drivers.

If you need some help upgrading to CR 2020 just let me know.

I had a strange one today – working on someone else’s report. The report was grouped by a formula that combined 2 fields, ItemCode and ItemSize. The formula looked like this:

{table.ItemCode} & ' - ' & {table.ItemSize}

I group on formulas like this often, so I didn’t see anything unusual. But the customer reported that two different sizes were being combined into one group. To troubleshoot this I put the ItemCode, the ItemSize and the formula all on the details band and looked at the values in the problem group. It was clear that two sizes (1.48 and 1.481) were being combined in a group that showed them both as 1.48.

I checked the data type of the ItemSize field and found that it was numeric which pointed to the problem. If you concatenate numeric fields and don’t specify the format using the ToText() function, Crystal will use your default windows format. This is typically to round to 2 decimals. So the two values above were rounded to the same value.

I changed the formula to be:

{table.ItemCode} & ' - ' & Totext({table.ItemSize} , 5 , '' )

This forced it to include 5 decimal places, and the empty string in the second argument eliminates commas in any numbers over 999. This version of the formula separated this item into two separate groups.

This is easy to miss so I thought others might appreciate the tip.