Archive for March, 2009



“On-Demand” Subreports that use saved data (no refresh needed)

Friday 27 March 2009 @ 11:47 am

I hate being wrong, but it isn’t as bad when I learn something new and useful.  One of my students wanted to use a row of small “on-demand” subreport buttons in one of their reports. The only problem was that the report had to be deployed in an environment that didn’t have access to the database.  That meant that relying on saved data with no refresh allowed.  Of course an on-demand subreport normally requires the ability to refresh.

But in his experimenting he did something that I was convinced would not work.  Continue Reading »
“On-Demand” Subreports that use saved data (no refresh needed)




Reporting on data that isn’t there Part 2 (Outer Joins)

Monday 23 March 2009 @ 11:55 am

This picks up on last months thread showing how to “fill in the gaps”  in a report that is missing a product, salesman or date.  The second option is to add a primary table that has all the values you want, and to link from this table to your existing tables, using an outer join.

Lets take the example from the last post where we want ALL salesmen to show up, even if they have no sales this month.  So we find a table that includes all of the salesman and use this table as the reports primary table.  Link this table to your transaction table with a “Left Outer” join.  This tells the database that you want all records from the primary table and only matching records from the transaction table.  Now all salesmen will show up and will also be available for cross-tabs and charts.

However, there is a serious weakness to this approach. Continue Reading »
Reporting on data that isn’t there Part 2 (Outer Joins)




New license restrictions for Crystal Reports

Monday 9 March 2009 @ 2:00 pm

Here we go again. Every two years I have to fire up the press because someone starts abusing the Crystal Reports End User License Agreement (EULA). This change is tied to Crystal Reports 2008 Release 2 (due in May). I don’t know anything about the fixes or new features of the release, but I have read the new EULA and I am disappointed.  There is a new key restrictions (A) that affect every user who takes a Crystal Reports class. I was asked not to publish the actual license but here is my paraphrase of restriction (A):

“When you take a class anywhere, on any of our products, you agree to pay us an additional fee – in whatever amount we choose”

Now they don’t use that exact wording Continue Reading »
New license restrictions for Crystal Reports




New license for redistributing Web apps

Sunday 8 March 2009 @ 6:31 pm

According to a blog post on the SAP network, SAP is now selling a license that allows you to redistribute web applications which include the Crystal Reports 2008 runtime engine.  Before this license, every deployment of a web application required the client to purchase one copy of Crystal Reports 2008 to provide the runtime license for the Crystal web engine. Now the application developer can purchase a “Developer Advantage” distribution license for $2500 that allows them the right to unlimited distribution of the runtime engine.  This only applies to CR 2008.  Deploying a web application on any prior version still requires that you follow the licensing model for that version.  Developer Advantage does NOT allow you to distribute the Crystal Reports designer, and it does NOT allow for “Software as a Service” deployments, both of which you should discuss with their OEM team.

There is still the option to purchase a single copy of Crystal Reports 2008 to support a single deployment, but this option is going to be phased out in favor of the Developer Advantage license.  The good news is that this has no effect on “Thick Client” or local deployments where the runtime engine is installed and run on a workstation.  Crystal Reports still allows unlimited deployment of client based applications if you use the developer edition of any prior version, or CR 2008 (which only comes in one edition).





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