I would like to migrate the reports from crystal reports to any free reporting tools. However, I don't want to rewrite the report in the new reporting tool. Are there any reporting tools which can read the crystal report files?
Is there a specific reporting tool that you are interesting in migrating to. Crystal Reports is one of the better tools for pixel perfect layouts and products out there are generally not comparable in the rich features available in CR.
Having said that, there are a not many results showing up on basic search. You might want to share more on the the kind of reporting solution you are intending to move to e.g. Is the intended tool a web control/toolkit or standalone reporting solution with scheduling etc.
The only tool that I could find is Crystal Report to SSRS (Yes SSRS is not free but assuming you have sql server this is bundled in for many editions). http://www.crystalmigrater.com/Default.aspx
There is a free RPT file viewer from the vendor - http://www.crystalreports.com/crviewer-confirm
Is there a way to modify the metadata of a Crystal Reports XI report .rpt file as text?
Suppose I need to modify a Crystal Reports XI .rpt file to change a common occurrence
throughout the file. I know if changing a table name or datasource, Crystal Reports
handles the remapping process from old to new. I'm not looking for that.
What I'm looking for here is a way to represent an .rpt file or an object
as text, modify it manually in a text editor and then import it to .rpt format.
A good analogy is Borland Builder 6 forms files (.dfm). I can copy a button object
as text and paste it to a text editor. Modify some properties and events, copy the
object block and paste it back in the Borland Builder 6 design mode window.
Borland Builder 6 knows this text block is a dfm object and pastes it in the
appropriate place, displaying the new modified button per the properties you typed in.
Is there something like this in Crystal Reports?
Unfortunately, not that I'm aware of. There is not even a way to do a search and replace among objects without third-party software (See this post). This is, in my opinion, one of the major flaws of CR.
There's nothing stopping someone from creating the tool that you describe using the Crystal Reports API, though.
With XI, you can do a lot with the SDK, but it will need to be done outside of Crystal Reports. For example, RptToXml.
With 2008, you can create an Add-In. It will add a new, top-level menu to Crystal Reports called 'Add-Ins'. Some quick research suggests that you will only be able to act upon the active report, passed to your code via a parameter (which it copies before your code acts upon it). Sadly, the API doesn't give you access to Crystal Reports itself, which would be really powerful (think macros). I suspect that SAP's OEM partners have access to a more-powerful, add-in SDK.
If you have BusinessObjects Enterprise, you might want to investigate MetaData Manager ($40K).
Another option might be Crystal Reports for Eclipse. Perhaps you can use Eclipse's plug-in framework or a third-party scripting language in combination with it (CR for Eclipse) to do something that meets your needs.
I've been browsing the web searching for an answer to this for a few weeks now, jumping back to other assignments at work because I can't figure it out. I've searched google, youtube, stackoverflow, and several more websites. The typical solution I get is to right click on the project and add a new item; a crystal report. The problem is that crystal reports isn't included in lightswitch. So my question is, how would I go about working with crystal reports in Microsoft Visual Studio Lightswitch?
Any help is much appreciated.
Thanks!
I haven't seen any information about anyone using Crystal Reports with LightSwitch. Is there some reason why you couldn't use SQL Server Reporting Services to create/display your reports? Maybe you didn't know about SSRS? It comes with SQL Server, so if you have a SQL Server license, you also have SSRS for free.
There's still no way for you to just right-click anything in a LightSwitch projectm in order to define a report, you'd still need to create your reports in SSRS , then display them (even passing parameters) with LS.
There's a little bit of a learning curve getting used to SSRS, but once you do, you'll find it works very well.
i've been researching for three days and i've finally found a way around this: Open an aspx page from a lightswitch application that contains the crystal report viewer control and will therefore load your crystal report. Just follow these steps and let me know if you need further clarification;
Publish your lightswitch application (with a custom button control that will open the aspx page on execute).
I looked up the code for the _Execute() method here: http://lightswitchhelpwebsite.com/Blog/tabid/61/EntryId/11/Printing-Sql-Server-Reports-rdlc-With-LightSwitch.aspx
Open published lightswitch application as website in vs ultimate.
Create crystal report (add items, crystal reports).
Create aspx page to hold crystal report viewer control (that will load crystal report).
NB: Give read/write permissions to iis users on C:\Windows\Temp
Hope this helps.
I haven't tried consuming Crystal Reports in a LightSwitch application (yet), however I would suspect that you could leverage an existing Silverlight control that could take care of the work for you. It might take some tweaking to get the viewer to wire up in LightSwitch, but I am sure it can be done.
UPDATE... I stand correct; until someone else proves otherwise - I can't find anything that supports a Crystal Reports viewer in Silverlight.
Is there anyway to have more control over Report Manager, is seems bizzare for such a sophisticated product to allow next to no control over the report manager section other than rename folders and place reports and report parts in these folders, as far as im aware I cannot even move them around and place them in any sort of order.
It would be nice if I could change the colour of folders and move them around freely.
Does anyone have any customization tips or control suggestions I may have missed for giving more control over this area to developers?
You can mess around a little bit with the SSRS stylesheets, but no, customization of Report Manager is not supported. SSRS is about the reports. Any sophisticated control or UI of the reports is beyond the scope of the SSRS product. On the other hand, there are some sophisticated JQuery techniques that could work for this sort of page manipulation if you want to dive into the Report Manager page structure.
(Stylesheets are at Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSRS10_50.MSSQLSERVER\Reporting Services\ReportManager\Styles in a default 2008 R2 install. Customization is not supported.)
I suspect that the use of Report Manager (as a percentage of total SSRS users) is far beyond what was originally imagined for the product. It is called the Report Manager, after all.
Consuming the web service in .NET or using URL report access are straightforward methods to deliver the reports through any interface you can build.
As Jamie says, customization of Report Manager is not very easy. A few techniques are discussed here:
http://weblogs.asp.net/jgalloway/archive/2006/12/12/reporting-services-add-a-logo-to-the-report-manager.aspx
If you want something flexible, I am working on an alternative open-source front-end for SSRS, called CrissCross:
https://github.com/codeulike/crisscross
Currently CrissCross is focused on better multi-pick widgets and better support for reports with many parameters. But as its open-source, you can use it as a foundation to build whatever you want.
We have been using .Net and Visual Studio for the last six years, and early on developed a number of web based reporting applications using the .Net version of Crystal Reports that was bundled with Visual Studio. I'm unimpressed with that product: It seems incredibly difficult and convoluted to use. We had to make security changes, install various extra software, and so on.
Now, we are moving to VS2008 and version 3.5 of the .Net framework, and the time has come to redevelop old applications. Our Crystal .Net developers are long gone and I face a decision: Do we stick with Crystal or move to something else? We have the "full" version of Crystal Reports XI at our disposal.
We produce PDF versions of data extracted from various databases. Some apps use the built-in Report Viewer but this seems redundant with the flexibility of grid views. We still need to produce printable PDFs in the grid or in a downloadable Excel format.
Is Crystal Reports .Net worth persisting with, or should we work out how to use version XI?
Alternatively is there a simple and low cost way to generate PDF reports without using Crystal?
I have experience with reporting in CrystalReports (trying lite version bundled with Visual Studio), ActiveReports from DataDynamics (4 years, full version), Reporting from Telerik (trying trial version) and XtraReports from DevExpress (last one year).
I think ( and not only me :) ), the CrystalReports are most uneficient tool ( developer productivity ) from this tools. The DataDynamics are much, much more better, bud is littlebit buggy :(. Last year we decided to change reporting suite - we have choosen a XtraReports ( with source code ), and I'm totaly happy. The price is little, no bugs ( to now :) ), wonderfull support, and ( the most important ) the productivity was grown a lot.
I recomend you DevExpress's or Telerik's reporting tools.
I would recommended i-net Clear Reports (used to be i-net Crystal-Clear). It can read your existing *.rpt files. Has a better and easier-to-use API (which I admit is not saying much...).
Like you, I've had poor experiences with Crystal Reports, and my gut instinct is to post "avoid it at all costs" in all caps with lots of exclamation points. However, I've had my afternoon nap today, so I'll post like a grownup.
If all you're looking to do is pdf-ize (yes, it's a real word, damnit!) then you might look into some of the PDF widgets like ABCPDF and the like. It's relatively easy to pop a well-formatted web page into a PDF document and be done with it.
However, if you need tight report formatting, consider sticking with crystal reports -- you have a big investment and knowledge base in the technology. Or, alternately, you could switch to ActiveReports or SQL Server reporting services.
I guess the cost/benefit analysis is the cost of retraining your dev team, and investing in the new technologies.
Move away from CR: just get a good PDF generator and Excel engine for .NET, and feed those using your own database code. You can use all the powerful .NET features, including LINQ, without having to wrestle with the Crystal Reports runtime and its woefully inadequate documentation and support.
I can suggest that the built in Microsoft reporting framework works adequately. You can do local reports or MS SQL server based reports. There is a client control that displays reports and can export to formats such as pdf and Excel. Visual Studio can handle report design for the stack.
As far as if it is better than Crystal Reports, I'd say check it out and see if you like it any better or worse. I've worked with the Microsoft Report Viewer more than Crystal Reports but both seem to be fairly similar. Offhand, Crystal Reports seems to be a more advanced reporting tool but more complicated.
I'm not sure about how to utilize the Microsoft Report Viewer infrastructure outside of Visual Studio. If you are using Visual Studio it should all be available in there and you can follow the online help instructions for deploying the pieces for your servers to your servers.
I have used ActiveReports from DataDynamics and Crystal Reports. Of these two, I would recommend ActiveReports above Crystal based on ease of use and, more importantly, future maintenance.
We use Crystal in our shop too. We are currently on 8.5, which is way old and is no longer supported by SAP. We tried to upgrade to CRXI recently, which involved an entirely new API. We had to shelf the effort due to other priorities. While working on the upgrade I found support for CRXI on a number of forums. Google it.
I believe you can find a cheap way to generate PDFs without using Crystal. I believe Adobe gives the creation part away for free. I would visit their site and look into it.
I would recommend staying with Crystal only if you had a lot of reports that were already using that technology.
Get out of Crystal Reports. They are poor.
Check out SQL Reporting Services. It works very well with .NET. Try it out. There is a learning curve, but when is there not?
IMO, you should consider other criteria as well such as:
Cost of the software
Integration with your .NET applications
API and Programmatic flexibility (All said and done, there are always the "customizations" and tailoring. For such scenarios , developers eventually fall back on programmatic solutions vs. out of box
Now, in my experience (having used both Crystal Reports and SSRS(2005/2008) , though Crystal Reports does come with a friendly set of API, it fails in many basic criteria and developers end fighting the software. This is I say based on my experience with SSRS where developers are far more comfortable with. For starters, it uses XML extensively and the provision to use custom code assemblies does not harm either.
--I think you would where I am getting at---
"Consider & Evaluate SSRS*. If you are hesitant at first, then do a Proof of Concept and test your requirements. I have a feeling you will be pleased with what you see
especially considering your requirement of using PDF format.
Developers, especially , MSFT specialists will thank you
Leverage the Programmatic rendering of the reports (though it sounds fancy , trust me , its not more than handling an API call
For e.g.:
public Byte[] Render
(
string Report,
string Format,
string HistoryID,
string DeviceInfo,
[Namespace].ParameterValue[] Parameters,
[Namespace].DataSourceCredentials[] Credentials,
string ShowHideToggle,
out string Encoding,
out string MimeType,
out [Namespace].ParameterValue[] ParametersUsed,
out [Namespace].Warning[] Warnings
out string[] StreamIds);
Member of [Namespace].ReportingService
)
--- where Format will be "PDF"
Hope you find this relevant