I recently learned how to fool MAS 90 into running a custom report based on a SQL command. This might only apply to older versions but I thought it was worth sharing just in case.

I created a report for a customer based on a command. It ran fine within Crystal but when added as a custom report in the MAS custom reports folder it generated an error.  We learned that MAS does a conversion step with custom reports and has to verify that all the tables exist. Our command obviously wouldn’t be found as a table so the conversion would fail.

After some web searching I found an old forum thread that described a workaround for using external tables in a custom report.  A few experiments confirmed that the same technique works for reports based on a SQL command.

The steps were to:
1) Use a similar report that uses only standard tables, and let SAGE do the conversion step on that report.
2) Open the real report (the one that uses a command) and go to File > Summary Info.
3) Modify the “keywords” section to say “Converted to version 4.40” (or your version) and save the real report.
4) Replace the first report that Sage converted with the real one.

Apparently SAGE marks the converted reports in the keywords section and skips that step if it has been done. So by adding that phrase we cause SAGE to skip the conversion, and the report seems to run fine.

My customer is using an MAS 90 4.4 which was replaced with 4.5 in 2012, but maybe this will help someone else. And if this works for you in a newer version, please let me know.