Crystal News - October 2003 - new ad hoc functionality

[new2ce]

I received a Crystal News e-mail today and one of the topics talked about was new ad hoc functionality with Crystal Enterprise. Is this true? They seemed to indicate that ad hoc reporting is more robust and they seemed to indicate that security might be better. Does anyone know about this? Is this NOT news? We currently run CE professional, version 9, and we are not turning on the Ad Hoc (RAS) portion due to our inability to secure the data our users report on. Our version of ad hoc also only lets us start with already written reports.

 

[MJRBIM]

Crystal Enterprise 9 PREMIUM has an Ad-Hoc tool that allows users to modify reports or create new report content within the web-environmnet without having Crystal Reports installed on their local PC. The demo looks pretty sexy, but the value for money isn't that great.

Compared to Crystal Reports - it's a "limted" tool...one of my clients looked at it and decided against the purchase.

They decided that they were better served by having a small set of report developers who manage the requests to modify and create report content, then use Enterprise for distribution.

 

[Turkbear]

Hi,
We also have decided that AD-HOC reporting on the web site has more downside than up - Not all report designers are equal and we do not want to risk bringing down our site due to a badly designed report..We have developers assigned to work with the business users and they create and test the reports in Client/Server mode ( with CR Pro and query analysis tools to minimize execution time)..
We then publish them to our development CE site and test their web functionality and appearance. Only then are they moved to the production site.

Just my 2c,

 

[RatSkin]

Hey about ad-hoc, don't forget that the end user can only see data definitions that the administrator exposes in a pre defined folder. also that these data sources are reports them selves, which ca be pre filtered to prevent server failures......

Rat.

 

[Turkbear]

Hi,
Maybe in some installations, but in Oracle for instance, authorized users can see all the tables thay are allowed to run reports against and there is no real way to control their ability to badly join them together.

So, unless the AD-HOC reporting is not 'really' ad-hoc, that is, the ability design a report from scratch on the web insteasd of the 'Smart Reporting' type of ad-hoc, then the user can do dumb stuff - usually by accident ;-).