Adding BLOB Fields to Reports in Crystal Reports Professional 8.5

[David Richardson]

Hi,

I'm hoping someone can help. I was recently asked to maintain/modify a crystal report in Crystal Reports Professional Edition 8.5. The data is in SQL Server and retrieved via Stored Procedures. I had to add some new fields to the Stored Procedure's returned values. However the Crystal Report wasn't seeing the new fields. I ran a VERIFY DATABASE function and that "repaired" the report so that it would see the new fields, BUT there were 3 Graphic Fields (BLOBS) that it removed from the report. When I try to add the fields back to the report by dragging and dropping them on to the report its no longer recognizing them as Graphics and instead calls them MEMO fields.

Can anyone tell me how to add these fields back to the report as GRAPHIC fields instead of MEMO fields ?

Thanks

David

 

[hilfy]

What version of SQL Server holds the data?

Crystal version 8.5 went out of support over 20 years ago. It's not able to work with some of the newer data types that are available in SQL Server. It also might be a function of the version of the data driver you used. If you have a newer version of SQL Server and the SQL Server driver that was installed by default on some versions of Windows, the driver might not recognize the graphics fields.

-Dell

Associate Director, Data & Analytics
Protiviti

http://www.protiviti.com

 

[David Richardson]

The report was developed in an older version of SQL Server. The present environment I'm trying to make the changes to the report in is using SQL Server 2022. I had not thought about it, that Microsoft may have made some change in the BLOB fields that causes Crystal Reports 8.5 to not recognize them properly. I'll have to test that theory. Thanks.

 

[dgillz]

Crystal 8.5 came out in 2001. I would try this in a much newer version of crystal.

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[David Richardson]

The reports are embedded in an application and executed using the Crystal 8.5 Runtime. Upgrading while necessary in the long run, is no small effort as the object model has changed and will require extensive recoding in the application. I am trying to find an immediate way to get around the problem. Thanks.

 

[hilfy]

Somewhere along the way in a SQL Server update there were changes to the internal representation of BLOB fields. Crystal 8.5 will not be able to use these new-style BLOB fields. The only way to get to them will be to upgrade the app to use the latest version of either the Crystal for Visual Studio SDK (.NET) or the Crystal for Eclipse SDK (Java).

If it's a Java app, I'm not sure how the code will have to change. If it's a VB or C++ app, there will be MAJOR code changes required because the COM component that was valid for Crystal 8.5 is no longer available or licensed, so you would have to use the .NET objects instead.

-Dell

Associate Director, Data & Analytics
Protiviti

http://www.protiviti.com

 

[David Richardson]

Dell,

Thanks for the info. I did have a long conversation with SAP about the latest version of Crystal Reports and I believe they told me I would have to use the Crystal for Visual Studio, but I think they said the COM layer was still available.. I can't be sure, that conversation was about a year ago, but if not we would get someone to write a COM wrapper. But, they only offer a 64bit version now and we are still using Access 32bit, so we will have to do the upgrade to Crystal and Access from 32bit to 64bit at the same time...

I did drop back from SQL Server 2022 to SQL Server 2016 to see if it would work properly, but still had the same problem. I don't know how far back I would have to go, and access to older versions of SQL Server are not all available so its going to take some trial and error and hopefully I won't hit a wall...

Thanks

-David

 

[hilfy]

The entire .NET SDK is based on COM components. However, current licensing will NOT allow you to directly access those components. So, you have to go through the Crystal for VS .NET SDK at this point. The last version of Crystal that allowed direct use of the COM components was Crystal XI, which went out of support about 10 years ago.

-Dell

Associate Director, Data & Analytics
Protiviti

http://www.protiviti.com