Archive for January, 2007
A couple of years ago I wrote an article comparing Crystal Server to home-grown web applications. One of the things I was told at the time was that a web application would be limited to 3 active process or ‘threads’. I was also told that this limitation could be expanded by adding processors because each additional processor would make 3 more ‘threads’ available. Rick Channing, a Crystal consultant just sent me a link to a new PDF that explains this in more detail. If the link has moved go to the Crystal Reports support site at SAP and do an “Advanced Search” for a document entitled “Component Licensing Explained”. (Recently this type of content has been restricted to users with active support contracts). Continue Reading »
Crystal Reports Web App Licensing/throughput clarified
I found this rather amusing. The Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA) gives out roughly 70 technology awards each February in a very wide range of categories. One of those categories is “Best Business Intelligence or Knowledge Management Solution”. This year Business Objects is one of the 5 finalists in this category, so BO put out a press release touting this ‘prestigious’ award. However if you look at the other 5 finalists you won’t find any of BO’s traditional competitors, like Cognos, Hyperion and Actuate. This made me wonder how products get nominated. Continue Reading »
Business Objects XIr2 a finalist for an SIIA CODiE award
Assume you have a series of dated transactions. Crystal allows you to use custom functions for things like Month to Date, Year to Date, etc. However these are always based on calendar periods. Month to Date is Calendar month. Year to Date is based on a calendar year, etc. Here is a method that you can use if your business year is a non-calendar or fiscal year. Continue Reading »
Calculating Fiscal YTD
There are functions in Crystal Reports to extract most pieces of a date, including the Year, the Month and the Day. When I first posted this entry I wrote that there was no function for extracting the Calendar Quarter. Many thanks to Gordon Portanier of Crystalize in Canada for reminding me that the DatePart() function has a ‘q’ argument for quarters. So the formula for extracting the quarter would be:
Continue Reading »
Calculating Calendar and Fiscal Quarters
New users often assume that just because two tables share a common field, that the tables can be linked in a report. But this is only true when the two tables can be successfully made into one composite table. And, there are only two logical ways that two tables can be combined into one: Linking them (horizontally) or appending them (vertically).
1) Linking is by far the most common. I describe it as horizontal because linking adds the columns of one table to the columns of the other. Continue Reading »
Linking tables vs Appending tables