Russell wrote
>
>This reply is from a pragmatic Crystal Reports user not from someone who
>knows Crystal internals well. I'm using the Crystal Reports Print Engine 16
>from a D1 application and some reports requiring a date range or name of
>person it brings back all records to the client pc for filtering. If there
>is a smarter way to use the CRPE I'd would welcome insight.
>
>There are many areas to evaluate something like CR. Examples: prior
>investment, cost of changing, export ability, ease of installation (my
>problem at present using it on NT4 boxes), ability to subreport, and others.
>
>For example, CR's exporting ability suits my requirements well. Reports can
>be exported to Excel, HTML, Lotus, RTF, Word files (mostly), into exchange
>folders and more. (I'm mixing CR32 and CR16 capabilities here)
>
>
Tony wrote
>[] I appreciate your comments Russell. (Not sure I understand your first
para too well. I think you are agreeing with us???)
>
>I am happy with QR (Despite all the bugs) but Customers KEEP on wanting
stuff done in Crystal thanks to the MS marketing lies. I'd like to have a
nice simple report builder to hand on to my customers instead of Crystal,
but there does not appear to be much out there. As Steve points out, if
your DB is anything larger than small (say 50MB) then Crystal is useless.
No chance of geting them to change their thinking I suppose? IMO it is
essential to be able to build the report around your own SQL.
>
>I don't consider your last Para a good reason. All of these can be done
easily using QR or writing your own Delphi Components anyway.
>
>Of course there is allways Report Smith!!!
>
Russell Replies:
In my first para I was thinking how nice it would be to speed up one report
I have in CR which takes too long because CR brings all records back to the
client for filtering. I could move up to Crystal Info, but that adds cost
to Winlaw and achieves only a five min saving per day for my clients. I
could also do filtering using the bde before invoking CR on a temporary
table. This then makes my report a one user at a time report - which is OK
in this case. Someone earlier said CR7 does server side filtering. I'm
still on CR5. The table record counts Winlaw deals with now are manageable.
Based on the good words spoken here about Report Builder Pro I looked at
the RBPro site
www.digital-metaphors.com
and liked what I saw.
Exporting reports is not as simple as you indicate. I'm thinking about
exporting reports to MSWord. CR can export to RTF faily well but it cannot
export correctly to MS Word preserving all the formatting, for documents
whose complexity is beyond that of RTF documents, but within Word 97 scope.
Perhaps CR 6 and 7 have been improved; the CR tech team once told me
something like "exporting 100% correctly to Word is in our too hard basket".
Regarding my problem with CR5.0.1.108 (16bit) on NT4. I have almost
concluded this verion of CR will not run under NT4. It installs on NT4 but
will not run. The 32 bit version will run on NT4 (at least I can export a
report and the exported package will run on NT). I'm waiting for comments
from the CR tech support team, when they return tomorrow. From this team
I've received one or two replies per working day.
So I'm preparing to shift my 16 bit apps report package into a D4 program
and this will mean having two bde's installed on each clients server. One
for the app and one for its reporting package.
Regards
Russell Belding
Belding Computing Devices
WINLAW, BIZXWORD, ENGPER.
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