Upgrading from CR 7 to 9.2

[Tazame]

I have found out today that next week we will be upgraded to CR version 9.2 (along with XP). I have been desperately searching for the implications of this.

As this is the early part of the XP rollout, the majority of our users will still be on NT4.0 with reports set up in V7.

Could anyone help me out with pitfalls I should be aware of?

Any responses gratefully received.

Never be afraid to try anything new.
A lone amateur built the ark. Professionals built the Titanic.

 

[synapsevampire]

How are the users viewing reports, do they all have Crystal installed?

CR 7 reports opened and saved with CR 9 cannot go back to CR 7, so make suer that you maintain a copy of the old reports in the old format.

There may be some obscure functionality in CR 7 which is NOT supported by CR 9, such as UFL's, Crystal Dictionaries, etc., for the most part you'll be fine.

One advantage to upgrading to CR 9 is that it can coexist with CR 7, so you don't need to whack the old install.

Make sure that you apply the CR 9 service Pack as well:

http://support.crystaldecisions.com....asp_selectlist#Crystal Reports Service Packs

-k

 

[FVTrainer]

One thing I experienced going from CR 7 to CR 8.5 (and I would assume this would happen going to 9) is that there were minor differences in the way the reports were rendered. For example, in a CR 7 report, if a text object was barely big enough heightwise to fully display the text, when the report was migrated to 8.5, the text started getting truncated (vertically). There could have been a printer driver dependency issue related to this, but given that you are moving to XP as well (and, presumably, getting different printer drivers), you may see some of this sort of thing as well.

 

[Tazame]

Thank you for your help, Synapsevampire and FVTrainer - I will check that the SP has been included in the rollout software.

We use an externally-supplied database that allows Crystal Reports to be used within it by including the relevant CR*.dlls with the database program.

Next step after upgrading of our department will be to see if a v9 report will run on an NT machine with v7 DLLs....

Never be afraid to try anything new.
A lone amateur built the ark. Professionals built the Titanic.

 

[stormtrooper]

synapsevampire: So what you're saying is that they can both be on the same machine?

 

[Turkbear]

Hi,
May I jump in synapsevampire?
I have 7 8.5 and 9 happily ( mostly) installed on my XP box. The only issue I found so far was in determining which version I wanted to open when I dbl-click on a .rpt file. I avoided much of that by not doing that.
( Doctor,It hurts when I do that--
Don't do that)

 

[Tazame]

Thank you Synapsevampire and Turkbear for your continued interest. In answer to your question Synapsevampire, each machine will be XP eventually but during the rollout, we need the reports to work on both XP and NT versions.

We have now upgraded some of the first machines and have found that the XP machines will not run v7 or v9 reports and NT will not run v9 through the externally supplied database.

This is all to do with the CR DLLs supplied (or not as the case currently is!) with the packaged database install and now that the crystaldecisions website is back up and running, hopefully it should be resolved very soon.

It is interesting to hear that v7 will work with XP as we had been advised to the contrary. We have copied the v7 dlls to the XP machine but it will still not run the v7 CR reports through the database. Our preference would be to install the v9 dlls through which would support both versions without further upgrade.

We have tested upgrading some of the reports to v9 and they work fine within Crystal itself but obviously we have been unable to test them as yet within EMS.

All makes for an interesting life.

Never be afraid to try anything new.
A lone amateur built the ark. Professionals built the Titanic.