I just stumbled across a FAQ on the SAP website that has some useful information. It was written in 2016 but the information still seems to apply. Many of the answers are links to other pages, like the link to the trial versions or the links to the service packs. I already had most of this information, but learned at least one new trick from the FAQ page.

Retrieving your License Key from the registry:

With older versions of Crystal you could go into Help > About and grab your complete license key.  This was helpful if you were changing hardware or installing on a second PC. With more recent versions you have to go into the license manager and you can only see a portion of the key. I recently had to track down a license key and wished I knew how to extract it from the PC.  Today I saw that 0ne of the tricks in the FAQ is how to find a full license key by searching the registry, using the portion of the key you can see in the license manager.  I’ll be ready next time.

Sometimes I need to make a temporary change to a report. For instance I want to might want to skip invoicing one or two customers for a week or two. So I will put a rule in the selection formula that eliminates them from the report. However, I have a tendency to lose track of these changes. Several months later I will realize that these customers have not been getting invoices.

So I have started putting in changes that are time limited. That way, I don’t need to remember to reverse the changes. For example, if I want to hold off on invoicing two customers for the next few days I could add something like this to the selection formula:

. . . and (if DataDate < Date (2018, 8, 31) then not ( {Cust.ID} in [‘ABCD’ , ‘EFGH’] ) else True )

In English this says, ‘if this report is refreshed before 8/31 then don’t include these two customers, otherwise ignore this rule’.

Eventually I will notice the rule and take it out but I don’t have to worry about when, because the rule turns itself off automatically. You can put a similar time limit on any change that can be driven by a formula.

When you preview a report in Crystal the left side of the screen should show you the “group tree”.  This lists all of the groups in the report.  It also allows you to go directly to the first page of any group, just by clicking on that value in the tree.

But a few times a year I work with a report where the group tree is in “Only Drill-Down” mode (ODD). In this mode, every entry in the group tree is accompanied by the drill-down indicator (a magnifying glass).  Clicking on an entry no longer takes you to the first page of that group but instead it takes you to a drill-down tab for that group. To get to the correct page for a group I have to do a search.

It is a minor irritation so I have let it go for years.  It just never seemed worth the time to figure out why some reports do this. But I figured it had something to do with the Hide/Suppress properties of the Group Header (GH) and Group Footer (GF). This week I got an ODD report from a customer, and so I decided to test all the combinations and see which ones were ODD.

I found four rules that control this behavior:

• If either the GH or the GF is visible you get the normal group tree.
• If both of those sections are suppressed you get the normal group tree.
• If both of those sections are hidden you get the ODD behavior.
• If one of those two sections is hidden and the other is suppressed you get the ODD behavior.

I can’t explain the reasoning behind this pattern (or even the purpose for the ODD behavior) but at least now I know how to change it when I see it.