Crystal 9 Web Licences

[Flopper]

Greetings,

I'm currently investigating the financial and technical details for publishing reports through Crystal 9 Web Components.

At present we publish reports through ASP pages using Crystal 8 Web Components. I've just learnt that a limit of 5 users exists for the number of concurrent connections allowed within Crystal 8, but the software cannot enforce this. Is this true?

If so, if i upgrade our application to Crystal 9 web components does this limit still exist and is it enforced?

Thanks

 

[IdoMillet]

AFAIK, in Cr 8 the limit is not enforced but in CR 9 it is.

Do you need to "publish" reports on a periodic/exception basis to html files on a web server or do you need to provide users the ability to request (ad hoc) for a report to be processed and published?

There are alternatives you may want to consider.

Cheers,
- Ido

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

http://www.MilletSoftware.com

 

[rabbit65]

I've been dealing with Business object for about three weeks on a similar issue.

As far as the five concurrent connections I have been told that once the five are used up the requests are queued up and have to wait. If the scripttimeout (assumes IIS) is the default the request has about 90 seconds before the browser will recieve the timeout error.

For Crystal 10, unless you buy Enterprise ($20 k per cpu, unlimited concurent connections), I believe you have to buy named user licenses for each user and they no longer have concurrent access to the RAS server or there is no way to bump them up? I'm not too sure about all this even after being on the phone with Business Objects for 3 weeks. They really need to get their act together on pricing and licensing or alot of people may just switch to SQL Server Reporting Services for free.

We've decide to buy adv. dev. and publish our reports as PDFs from a batch process once a day since we do not have a real time requirement.

 

[IdoMillet]

rabbit,

Just curious: What mechanism are you using to publish the PDF reports and why did you have to buy the Advanced version for this? Based on your convesations with the people at Business Objects, didn't the Broadcast License go away in CR 10?

Cheers,
- Ido

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

http://www.MilletSoftware.com

 

[rabbit65]

I am using the save method of the bytearray object from the RAS/COM:
call clientDoc.PrintOutputController.Export(5).Save("c:\MyCompany\projects\pm\" & rs.fields("initials&quot.value & ".pdf", True)

Where Export(5) the five indicates export in PDF format.

As I understand it, and that's not saying much , Advanced developer comes with a limited version of RAS now called "Enterprise Embedded Edition".

Maybe you can make more sense out of it. Here's the link describing it.

http://www.businessobjects.com/products/reporting/crystalreports/licensing/details.asp#intrptweb

JB

 

[IdoMillet]

Thanks for the clarification.

Since all you are doing is a batch push mode, you may want to consider as alternatives one of the 3rd-party Report Managers listed at:

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

At least one of those tools allows you to specify a dynamic export file name based on data in the report (like you do in your code).

I think you can find a cheaper, easier, and more powerful solution that way.

Cheers,
- Ido

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

http://www.MilletSoftware.com