The Crystal Reports Underground News - Volume 2004.03 (March 2004)
an independent source for Crystal Reports Information by Ken Hamady
Contents for March, 2004:
** Summary of Crystal Enterprise v10 Options and Pricing
** New "Business Days" Formulas:
** "Wonderful how you related our data into the course material"
** Special Offer on SPL 2 and .rpt Inspector 2
** Visual Cut 3.0
** My Library of Crystal Reports Materials:
Expert's Guide to Formulas
Expert Techniques Volumes I and II
Quick Reference to Crystal Reports in Visual Basic
Quick Reference to Crystal Reports in VB.NET
** Parameter remembers last choice in v10
** Locking the size of a Box by going past the margin
** New formula for 6-digit number to date.
** Changing the Btrieve DAT file used by a report
** Read back issues at http://www.kenhamady.com/news.html
Crystal Enterprise v10 Options and Pricing:
Kevin McManus of 5x Technology recently sent me a PDF that outlines Crystal Enterprise v10 configuration options and features. You will find it on the LIBRARY page of my site. Here is the short version with my own comments and some approximate list prices. These prices do not include annual maintenance, which is an additional 20%. In the past maintenance has been required in the first year, but that may not be true currently. Government and Educational discounts run about 20% below these prices. Resellers like CDW are currently only selling Embedded and Express Editions to the public, but they are selling Professional and Premium on their government price schedule.
There are 4 editions of Crystal Enterprise:
Embedded (RAS)
This is for Web developers who want to develop COM, Java or .NET applications. You get a version of this edition for free with Crystal Reports v10 Developer Edition, but this only allows you to create a test application. To deploy your application you must upgrade to the Advanced Developer Edition. Alternately, you can buy a processor license for the Embedded Edition for about $25,000 from several web sites.
Express
Unlike the older CEv9 Standard, the new CEv10 Express only supports named users, not concurrent users. This means that it has security features but it does not include scheduling, business views or several other features of CE Professional. It is also limited to a single server so it is only appropriate for smaller environments. It comes for free with Crystal Reports v10 Professional and includes your first 5 named users. Additional users are about $450 per user. These are also available from several web sites.
Professional
This can be deployed with named and/or concurrent users. It supports multiple server installations and Unix servers. Unlike Express, it includes scheduling, alerts and business views. Five named users of CEv10 Professional come for free with CRv10 Developer, but these can only be used for testing. To deploy your 5 users you must upgrade to the Advanced Developer Edition. The cost to expand beyond the 5 would be:
$700 per Named User (NUL) minimum of 25 (5 from some resellers)Premium
$4,100 per Concurrent User (CAL) minimum of 5
$64,500 for a Processor license
Includes all the features available for Crystal Enterprise, including Ad Hoc reporting and Excel Analysis on the web. The prices are:
$1,000 per Named User (NUL) minimum of 25 (5 from some resellers)Also, note the following changes in the licensing:
$5,900 Concurrent User (CAL) minimum of 5
$88,000 for a Processor license
1) It now explicitly states in the license that Developer Edition cannot be used to deploy Crystal Enterprise other than for testing. CD tried to fudge that in v9 by saying in the marketing literature that the Developer Edition was 'intended' for testing, but the license didn't have a restriction. With v10 it is clear that you have to buy the Advanced Edition to do deploy anything more than Express.
2) If you use CAL licensing you are no longer allowed to use an external program to queue requests for optimal processing.
New "Business Days" Formulas:
One of my most popular formulas is the one that allows you to find the "Business Days" between two dates, ignoring holidays and weekends. I have updated this formula hold the holiday list in a separate formula. I have also added a formula that allows you to add a specified number of business days to a date, skipping both holidays and weekends. See the Formulas page on my web site.
"Wonderful how you related our data into the course material" - KW:
This comment is from one of my classes in December. My specialty is teaching at your office, with your data, and I charge about half of what Crystal charges for on-site classes. I have personally taught over 1600 satisfied students and I am still the all-time, top ranked Crystal Reports expert at Tek-Tips.com. To schedule a class, or for more information, give me a call at (540) 338-0194.
Special Offer on SPL 2 and .rpt Inspector 2:
Software Forces has just released updates to 2 of their most popular products, and are offering special savings for the rest of March:
rpt Inspector 2
This is the only tool I know of that allows you to search across multiple reports for a specific feature, like a formula, and then change that feature in all of the reports in one stroke. Version 2 is full of dozens of improvements and it now fully supports subreports. It can be used with versions 5 through 9 of Crystal Reports. The cost is $395 but this month save $100 on your purchase. See the LINKS page of my site for more information and a free 30-day trial.
SPL 2 (Smart Pick Lists):
SPL is designed to fix one of the glaring limitations in the Crystal Reports product line, the ability to have parameter fields generate dynamic pick lists at runtime. SPL solves this problem for Crystal Enterprise users. It allows you to generate both dynamic and cascading pick lists. The cost is $6,000 but this month save $500 on your purchase. See the LINKS page of my site for more information and a free 30-day trial.
Visual Cut 3:
Millet software has just released a new version of Visual Cut, their tool for scheduling, exporting, bursting and Emailing reports. Visual Cut 3.0 has an improved user interface and allows you to get updates to the software online. New features include the ability to create PDF Bookmarks from both main and subreport groups and command line parameters to define several common date ranges. Visual Cut is still only $225. See the LINKS page of my site for more information, or contact me if you would like to request a trial version.
My Library of Crystal Reports Materials:
Expert's Guide to Formulas ($36)
http://www.kenhamady.com/form00.html
Expert Techniques Vol. I ($19) and Vol. II ($19)
http://www.kenhamady.com/expert.html
Quick Reference to Crystal Reports in Visual Basic ($16)
http://www.kenhamady.com/vbref.html
Quick Reference to Crystal Reports in .NET ($14)
http://www.kenhamady.com/ntref.html
Parameter remembers last choice in v10
I just noticed another little feature added to CRv10 and not mentioned anywhere. When you refresh a report that has parameter fields from within CR the parameter will remember the value you selected the LAST time (in the same session). This becomes the default value. In previous versions of CR, each refresh would reset the parameter to the original default value. Read last month's newsletter for my review of CRv10.
Vertical Height of a box gets Locked (v8 - v10)
I had a box on my report and was sizing it in preview mode. Suddenly I noticed that I could not move the box up or down, or change the vertical size by using the sizing handles. The first few times I thought I was missing the handle, but soon it was clear the size would change and then snap back to the original size. I finally realized that I had accidently sized the left edge of the box out side of the printable area of the report. When I went into "Object Size and Position" I noticed that the "X" was a negative number.
While Crystal would preview the box with an edge in the non-printable area, it would no longer allow vertical movement in preview, and depending on the version might also lock some coordinates in design mode as well. The solution was to bring the edge of the box back into the printable area. This could be done either by dragging the sizing handle or setting the coordinate to zero. Now the box could be sized again. Variations of this behavior could be found in versions 8, 9 and 10.
New formula for 6-digit number to date:
I have a formula on my site that allows converting an 8-digit number into a date. However, the formula assumes that the number is in YYYYMMDD format. I recently had a customer whose system date was a number in MMDDYY format, which meant that it could be 5 or 6 digits in length with only a 2 digit year. I wrote a formula for him to use and have posted it with formula #2 on my FORMULAS page.
Changing the Btrieve DAT file used by a report:
Those of you using Btrieve (DDF and DAT files) may run into a problem when you try to have the report read a different set of DAT files than those used at the time the report was created. This has come up twice for me with folks doing a PeachTree upgrade. It appears that Crystal Reports v9 won't let you set the location to a new DAT file unless it can still find the old DAT file in it's original place at the same time. The simply solution is to put a copy of the original file in its original path until you have completed the "Set Location". Alternately, you can download the hot-fix for this as described in the following Knowledge Base article:
http://support.businessobjects.com/library/kbase/articles/c2014632.asp
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Contact Information:
Ken Hamady, MS
525K East Market St.
PMB 299
Leesburg, VA 20176
(540) 338-0194
ken@kenhamady.com
http://www.kenhamady.com
Copyright 2004 by Ken Hamady
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