Archive for May, 2014



R-tag introducing a lower priced scheduler edition

Wednesday 21 May 2014 @ 8:00 am

R-tag is introducing a new price point for their desktop scheduler, the Crystal Scheduler Edition at $299.  They are still offering their free “community edition” without any support, but those that need support will now have less of a price hurdle when upgrading to the supported product.  The $299 edition will only support Crystal Reports.  If you want support for SSRS,  ad-hoc queries and dashboards you will need to upgrade to the Pro Edition at $749.  See my updated comparison for more information.




“Saved Data” Select Expert/Formula

Monday 19 May 2014 @ 8:52 am

In the current versions of CR, you have 3 choices for the select expert and the selection formula.  The main one is Record Selection which is the one you use for database fields and most formula fields.  Then there is Group Selection which is used for subtotals and other summary fields.  But the third an most recent addition is the one for “Saved Data”.  I have ignored this feature since it was introduced, mainly because the explanations I read didn’t make any sense to me. The idea is that you can put rules here when you only want the rule to apply to saved data. But if you have saved data you can put the same rule in the regular record selection formula and just tell the report to use saved data, so it seemed to simply confuse things. It might make sense for those using the SAP viewer where you are limited to saved data. This would allow you to deploy parameters that don’t ask the user about refreshing the data.  But since my customers typically use viewers that CAN refresh data this doesn’t come up.

But after a customer asked me about this feature I gave it some more thought.  I realized that a better way of saying this is that it is a rule that is applied locally, meaning that it Continue Reading »
“Saved Data” Select Expert/Formula




Server-based scheduler comparison (2014)

Friday 16 May 2014 @ 10:34 pm

I have just updated my comparison of server-based scheduling tools for 2014. These tools are similar to the desktop-based scheduling tools I write about every March, but these are designed to be run on server. This allows multiple people to schedule reports for automated delivery by Email, FTP or network folder.

There are 8 products on the list this year with one new release and another being discontinued.  There are also a few feature updates and price changes since last year. The blog page provides a brief overview of each product. It also has a link to the feature matrix that compares roughly 70 features of these tools. There is even a feature glossary that defines all the terms. So if you need a short course in automating Crystal Reports delivery, this is a pretty good place to start.




Searching for SAP support articles

Wednesday 7 May 2014 @ 11:06 pm

My blog automatically checks for links that no longer work. It recently found a batch of broken links for old Crystal support articles. These were hosted on a Kanisa support site which is gone. Now they have (mostly) been incorporated into the SAP support engine. If you ever need to search SAP for support content and KB articles you should now use the following link:

http://search.sap.com/





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