Table of Contents in Crystal Reports

[TheBlondOne]

Hi all,

Some of you may have seen this already but for those who haven't I've attached a link on how to create a Table of Contents in a Crystal Report.

I've attached the link at the bottom of this message which will take you to a page on BO's website. What the link show's you is how to add a table of contents into a Crystal Report.

The table of contents was a request from a client and in order for us to get the work we needed to do a TOC.

I didn't quite do mine the way BO have done as I didn't find this FAQ until I was about 3/4 of the way through it. The logic I used in the report wasn't too disimilar to the logic BO have used though.

I did however go through the TOC that BO have done after I had finishsed - this was mostly out of curiosity - and found that is was pretty good. The steps are easy enough to follow so there shouldn't be too many problems there. The only problems I found were when you create the 'LinkMaker' formula, you need to be careful with your single quotes which are used pretty frequently throughout the formula otherwise this can start to cause a bit of a headache. The LinkMaker formula is basically a bit of SQL which will write back to a table in the database to store the information but for those who have used SQL in crystal there tends to be a lot of single quotes used, but in general the instructions are pretty clear.

Here's the link to the page for the TOC.

http://support.businessobjects.com/library/kbase/articles/c2011950.asp

Hope this is of some use.

Have fun )

 

[MJRBIM]

I like the warning messages. They clearly state that this is an unsupported use of the CR software. If anything bad happens on the DB side because of this solution - you are on your own...

====================
WARNING:

Crystal Reports is not recommended as a tool to write to, update or delete from a database. Database clients or applications designed specifically to edit databases should be used instead. However, now that CR has full SQL functionality it is possible to write to, update and delete from databases. This article is provided as a tip.

Before attempting to implement the steps in this article, consult your Database Administrator (DBA). Your DBA needs to grant specific rights to your database.
====================

====================
WARNING:

Use INSERT INTO, DELETE or UPDATE statements at your own risk. Once a command object containing an INSERT INTO, DELETE or UPDATE statement has run, the database has changed and the changes may not be reversible.
====================

Our CIO says "unsupported vendor solutions are not really vendor solutions", and in this case I have to agree.

I think that if BOBJ really wants to handle TOCs they should make it an actual supported function within Enterprise (maybe in the "Report Packages") or the Repository Database.

 

[TheBlondOne]

Yeah there are a few warning messages.

It shouldn't really affect the database as your setting up a completely new table dedicated to containing the group and page info for the TOC.

I can see where they're coming from though especially if you try to use a live table in the database, this could cause some damage.