Exporting CE to ASCII

[EricVonSkip]

I am using CR 8.5 and CE 8. I am trying to export a report to ASCII and the only options I have to choose from are six (6) canned export types (Crystal Reports 8, Crystal Reports 7, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Word, Rich Text Format, Adobe Acrobat). Is there a way to export to ASCII or add ASCII as an export choice after the report has been run.

 

[synapsevampire]

Perhaps you can define what ASCII means to you as ASCII is a character set, and pretty much everything uses ASCII. Do you mean a text file? Comm Delimited? Tab delimited?

Try using the scheduling to export, it has more formats available.

-k

 

[EricVonSkip]

Sorry about that I am looking to export to either a text file or a tab delimited

 

[rhinok]

If you're going to export to Text (Paginated or otherwise) and you want true ASCII formatting, then you'll have to make sure your environment is set up properly:[ol][li]The Report Job Server must be logged in as a Domain User with Administrative Rights to the machine[/li][li]You must use Courier 10 as the font in your reports (possibly Lucida Console 10)[/li][li]You can't use any special formatting in your reports (bolds, underlines, etc...)[/li][li]Depending on the user account used to install CE, you may need to change certain registry settings on the server[/li][li]During the report design process, when you export to paginated text, you need to set the Characters Per Inch to '12'. If you don't have this option, you may need to modify registry settings[/li][/ol]


~Kurt

 

[synapsevampire]

Kurt: This is dependent upon the OS. Pre-Windows 2000 systems wrote ASCII files, W2K and up started producing Unicode, if that's what you mean. I'm not sure what a Unix based CE system might produce, probably ASCII based files.

http://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/0,289893,sid9_gci211600,00.html

Eric: Did you try selecting the report in eportfolio and using the Schedule->Format and selecting one of the text file type exports?

-k

 

[rhinok]

Hi K,

I was assuming Win2K as the operating system, since that's the most common installation. Courier 10 (not Western) isn't Unicode compliant, whereas Lucida Console is. Either way, its a fixed width font, which is what is really required within the report itself.

These are the steps we had to take for one of our clients. Painful, but works...

The issue we had specifically is that reports looked great in designer, but were awful in CE even though the same printers/drivers were used. The issue came down to the fact that the Report Job Server is the service that controls scheduled printing from CE and, due to Win2K printer issues, the account running the Job Server must be a domain acct. That same domain account should have registry settings that set the default char per inch to 12. If not, the CE output won't match the CR output, even on the same machine.


~Kurt