Serving up Reports

[BillPeck]

What is the basic method for providing reports to users?

This is for a small organization, one database, the goals are:

- a nice facility to view reports
- reports are viewed in "runtime" mode, i.e., not from within Crystal "designer".
- menu'ing facility
- logon on once

Thanks.

Bill

 

[vidru]

I'd either write my own report viewer, or investigate the report viewers at Ken Hamady's site:

http://www.kenhamady.com/bookmarks.html

-dave

 

[Madawc]

You can export Crystal reports to Excel, Word, PDF etc. Where I work, a lot of users prefer Excel because they can do their own processing on it, maybe adding data from some other souce.

Quality of exports varies. Crystal 8.5 is fine if you have the latest dlls and patches.

Madawc Williams
East Anglia, Great Britain

 

[IdoMillet]

If Excel/PDF exports are not good enough, go with Dave's recommendation of 3rd-party viewers:

http://www.kenhamady.com/bookmarks.html

You should be able to check the linked web sites for most of your requirements. For the "logon only once" functionality you would probably need to contact the developers and ask.

In the case of my "DataLink Viewer" you indeed logon only once (if the reports you open can access the data using the same user id & password), as long as you don't close the viewer. Once you close the viewer, only the User ID is remembered. There is an option to automatically set the user id & password during startup (so the user doesn't need to logon even once).

hth,
- Ido

CUT, Visual CUT, and DataLink Viewer:
view, e-mail, export, burst, distribute, and schedule Crystal Reports.

http://www.MilletSoftware.com