There are several viewers out there that allow you to keep a report open on the screen and have the report automatically refreshed every few minutes. Some users will even display these reports on a large screen to allow everyone to monitor key metrics in real time.

DataLink Viewer from Millet Software is one viewer that supports auto-refresh.  Ido Millet has recently added a feature that speeds up the process for one of my clients. The client wanted to auto-refresh the same report in several different locations. But the report takes a long time to run and taxes the server. We didn’t want every location to run the same report continuously. So now DataLink Viewer has an option to automatically reload a report that has saved data, instead of refreshing it. My customer uses a scheduling tool to run the report once every 15 minutes and export it to RPT format. This type of export saves the report with data. Then DataLink Viewer can all reload the exported RPT and see the most recent export. This allows any number of viewers to display timely data while only the scheduled hits the database.

For more information on viewers, auto-refresh or DataLink Viewer, please see the LINKS page on my site or my review of Crystal Reports Viewers: