Informational post
I finally had success using the new crystal reports Version 8.5 to generate a report from a servlet. As long as Seagate doesnt change anything we now have ultimate control over the data that crystal report's displays all without a single line of VBScript.
There are a few gotchas though..
1) the XML encoding method MUST be <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-16" ?> using <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?> will NOT work.
You can set this up with your transformer by
transformer.setOutputProperty(javax.xml.transform.OutputKeys.ENCODING,"UTF-16");
2) you need to map your servlet with a .xml extension. in your web.xml add a servlet-mapping
<servlet-mapping>
<servlet-name>
MyServlet
</servlet-name>
<url-pattern>
/MyServlet.xml
</url-pattern>
</servlet-mapping>
Crystal reports automatically expects an xml extension. However when it prompts you for the table name you can send parameters like MyServlet?report_data_type=4 and these parameters will be recieved by the server.
3) Set the table hints and row hints as specified by crystal reports
