Next month I will be reviewing all of the RPT management utilities, and there is one new product this year. Find it EZ has recently released Dev Surge Enterprise 2015 which is designed to work with SAP’s enterprise level software products (BOE Enterprise and CR Server).  It does everything that the original Code Search Pro does, but adds a number of features including:

• Reading reports contained in Crystal Server 2008 through 2013 repositories
• Reading reports contained in BOE XI 3.0 through BOBJ BI 4.1 repositories.
• Reporting on the properties of BOE Infoview Crystal Report schedules
• Reporting on user security access to BOE Infoview Reports and shortcuts
• Reading reports contained in several version control systems (VSS, git, etc)
• Doing report comparisons

Dev Surge Enterprise 2015 costs $468 and more information is available on the product web page.

There are certain software vendors out there that like to store their dates in numeric fields. This includes several SAGE accounting and ERP products. This poses a challenge when a user wants to create a report with a date or date range parameter.

One option is to use numeric parameters. This works fine but the user no longer gets to enter a normal date, and no longer gets a calendar control to use.

Another option is to write a formula to convert the Continue Reading »
Date parameters when your dates are numeric

This is my annual chart showing the versions of Crystal Reports that my newsletter subscribers were using when they signed up. It gives you a sense for which versions are being used and how quickly the new versions are catching on. I have included numbers for 2015 so far even though the year is only about half way there

Note that 43% of this year’s new subscribers are actively using products which are 10 years old (XI) or even older.

I have written before about using auto-complete when writing Crystal Reports formulas. I have actually written about it twice because I sometimes forget about my own previous posts).

During a recent remote consult I was writing a new formula.  I used auto-complete to insert an existing formula into the new one.  My instance of Crystal Reports immediately crashed.  I thought it was a fluke so I reopened Crystal and repeated the same steps. Crystal crashed a second time.

So I had the customer send me the report and I opened it on my own computer. I added the same formula using autocomplete and it didn’t crash, but I did get an error message saying “Invalid Argument”.  That happened every time I tried to add that field using auto-complete.  So I used the mouse to select the field and that worked fine. That is when I noticed that there was an extra space at the end of the formula name. I have seen one bug with spaces at the beginning of a formula name so I figured the space on the end might be causing the new problem.  I tried other formulas and found that auto-complete worked fine as long as there was no space on the end.  I guess in some environments that error can cause CR to completely crash.

I can think of no reason to intentionally end a formula name with a space. But when I am duplicating and renaming a series of formulas it is easy to leave a space at the end and not notice. And these spaces won’t be very obvious when you look at a list of formulas. So if you get one of these behaviors, this is one more thing to check.