It is always a good sign when vendors respond quickly to user requests.  Earlier this month the developers of Find it EZ received a request from a potential customer.  He needed to search for table and field names within his SQL commands and SQL expressions.  The next day this user was using a new version of Find it EZ, including this new feature.  The user was surprised that he didn’t even need to fill in the report parameters before the SQL was searched – something required by his old software.

This support for embedded SQL searches is now included in the current release of Find it EZ.  It also added a search of Crystal Dashboards (Xcelsius) files and even the embedded Excel models.   See this article for more info on Find it EZ and special pricing through the end of this month.

It has been one year since I did my first comparison of formula function libraries, so it is time for an update.  If you aren’t familiar with the term, User Function Libraries (or UFLs) are DLL files that add new formula functions to your Crystal Reports formula editor.  With these functions your formulas can do some pretty amazing things like:

1) Carry values from today’s report to tomorrow’s report, or from one report to another.
2) Append lines to an external text file.
3) Automatically copy a value to the clipboard.
4) Check the user name of the user running the report.
5) See if a file or folder exists – either on your network or on the internet (http).
6) Rename/copy/delete a file on your hard drive or network drive.
7) Launch an application or run a batch file.
8) Execute a SQL statement (Select/Insert/Delete).
9) Send an Email using information in the report.
10) Create a table of contents or an index for your report.
11) Calculate distances between zip codes or long./lat. coordinates.

If this sounds interesting you can read my complete comparison including a list of all the functions provided by each DLL.   The four primary sources are:

Bjarke Viksoe (U2lwin32)
Millet Software (CUT Light)
Chelsea Tech (File Mgt, Text, Share and others)
CrystalKiwi (Export, Table of Contents)

Last night I had a customer with a strange problem.  Their report ran fine and looked great in preview and when printed.  But if it was exported to PDF it had a long line down the page.  This didn’t happen if it was printed to a PDF driver so the only time it was visible was when using the CR export function.

I opened the PDF and there was a vertical line on every page, even on blank pages, starting near the top.   I opened the RPT and there was no visible object anywhere near the sections at the top where the object should be sitting.  I was getting ready to start deleting objects one at a time to see if it was tied to a specific object, but first I decided to Continue Reading »
Mystery line in PDFs

Yesterday I was asked if there was a simple way to group records into Spring, Summer, Fall and Winter.  There are several ways but I think this is the simplest.  I convert the month and day into a number by multiplying the month by 100 and then adding the day number.  This gives every day of the year a sortable value from 101 to 1231. Then you can use that value in a formula like this:

Local NumberVar x := Month({Orders.Order Date}) *100 + Day ({Orders.Order Date});
If x < 320 then "Winter" else
If x < 621 then "Spring" else
if x < 923 then "Summer" else
if x < 1221 then "Fall" else "Winter"

If you were considering trying out Find it EZ this might be a good month to do it. For the month of November, Find it EZ is offering my readers a 30% discount on their scanning tool. It is designed to find all uses of a particular table or field in any layer of your project. So it goes beyond scanning your RPT files and also scans your application source code, your SQL queries, documentation, config files and just about anything else. It even includes plugins that integrate automatically into Visual Studio and Eclipse.

When you scan your project for a proposed change Find it EZ will generate an ” Impact Checklist” that Continue Reading »
Find it EZ offers a 30 % discount