It has been 5 years since I first wrote about the script errors that affect the Crystal Reports start page. This issue comes up again periodically and several customers have had these issues recently. So if you are having issues with the start page here are the articles that should help:

https://kenhamady.com/cru/archives/2615
https://kenhamady.com/cru/archives/147

The fix is pretty simple and involves renaming two HTML pages in one of Crystal’s application folders. This prevents Crystal start page from trying to access the web.

Since the start page is  written in HTML I decided to have a look at how it worked. I was hoping to modify the page to show links to my most frequently used reports. After much experimenting I found a way to create hyperlinks that would open reports based on specified path and file name. The key was to ‘borrow’ the custom javascript function that is used to open your most recently used reports. The function is called fncrOpenReport.

So I edited the HTML in the start page and put in a few lines like this:

<A href="javascript:fncrOpenReport('C:/sample.rpt')">Sample Rpt</A>

The next time I started Crystal the start page included a section of new hyperlinks. The one above appears as the words “Sample Rpt”. When I click that hyperlink it opens the RPT specified in the fncrOpenReport function. This section works much like the “My Recent Reports” section but these reports won’t roll off the page as other reports are opened.

The only odd part about using this function is that reports opened this way cannot use “save as” until after you click “save”.  If you click “save as” without having clicked “save” the dialogue just doesn’t open.