Archive for March, 2008



SAP Retiring overlapping products

Friday 28 March 2008 @ 6:44 am

According to am article at cio.com, SAP is going to start retiring some products that overlap between the SAP and Business Objects product line. Retiring products mentioned in the article include:

Business Objects’ SRC
SEM Business Consolidation System
Business Objects’ performance management product

But the most interesting comment to me was this one:

“It still has to deal with overlap between Crystal Reports, Web Intelligence, Dashboard Builder, Voyager and other products on the Business Objects side, and Visual Analyzer and BEx BI from SAP. Analysts expect mostly Business Objects products to take precedence.”

So it looks like Crystal Reports will survive this merger just as it did when BO purchased Crystal Decisions.




Displaying chosen paramater values with descriptions

Wednesday 26 March 2008 @ 3:40 pm

When you create a parameter field in Crystal Reports you can create a “pick list” of values so that the user can select a value rather than typing the value. If your pick list is a series of codes you can also add a second column of values to provide a description for each code. So your pick list might look like this:

A – Adjustments
C – Credits
D – Debits

The challenge comes when you want to display the user-selected values on the report. Continue Reading »
Displaying chosen paramater values with descriptions




“Free” vendor management from Vendormate

Wednesday 12 March 2008 @ 10:39 am

This has nothing to do with Crystal Reports directly but I think it is important for my customers and other consultants to be aware of. Before you give your next fixed price quote to a large organization, ask them what paperwork and fees (if any) are involved in becoming a new vendor. Normally a w-9 tax form is all I am asked for. Some customers require an insurance certificate and a few have a special form to fill out.

But some companies are starting to have all of their vendors managed through a new and rapidly growing company called Vendormate. Continue Reading »
“Free” vendor management from Vendormate




CR 2008 Service Pack 0 breaks Xbase Connector

Wednesday 12 March 2008 @ 9:59 am

I have used Crystal Reports with Xbase (Dbase/Foxpro/Clipper) files for years, primarily with Goldmine. Goldmine is a contact manager and stores files in DBF format. With just about every Crystal upgrade I have had to change the way I make the connection to the DBF files. So I was surprised a few months back when CR 2008 (version 12) cleanly ran all of my internal reports with no changes. It Continue Reading »
CR 2008 Service Pack 0 breaks Xbase Connector




Cascading parameters when two fields have the same name

Saturday 1 March 2008 @ 4:09 pm

I was recently asked to solve another problem with a cascading parameter. Apparently two fields in the cascade had the same field name (but were from different tables). This isn’t unusual when you have several tables with fields named “Description” or “Code”. But in a cascade each level may need to create a separate parameter, and each parameter is named after the field that provides its data. So when CR finds a duplicate field name in the cascade it tries to create a duplicate parameter name and this generates an error. There is no visible option for renaming either parameter.

The solution Continue Reading »
Cascading parameters when two fields have the same name





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