Crystal Reports in Clipper

[Rahja]

I want to update my Clipper App Reports to use Crystal Reports. I have the latest Crystal App but do not understand what I need to do to have clipper call the report and what the report actually requires to run. I am assuming there would need to be a run-time engine available for the report. Where do I find that engine and how do I make it work?

Thanks

 

[TonHu]

You can't use a direct connection (like OLE or by calling entrypoints) from Clipper (16 bit DOS environment) to any Windows DLL or library (32 or 64 bit).
Possible solutions:
- Run an external commandline or config-file driven tool to access the reports (probably a last resort)
- Switch to a reporting library that actually supports Clipper
- Switch to a commercial xBase compiler like XBase++
- Switch to Harbour or xHarbour, the open source Clipper replacement compilers.

Last option is what I would recommend most, ofcourse (I've been recommending this for some years now, an unpaid sort-of 'job', but I'm just a happy user).

Harbour (

http://www.harbour-project.org)

and xHarbour (

http://www.xharbour.org

and

http://www.xharbour.com)

are compilers that translate Clipper code to C and then run a C-compiler to turn that into executable code. Both have a similar featureset, as xHarbour was forked off of harbour. Both are mature and stable environments, but they may take a little time to set up properly (instructions are on the websites). If you would need commercial support, you could go for xHarbour.com, as they offer a subscription model in addition to extra tooling and libraries, both for Windows and Linux.
Both offer better OO-programming models than Clipper, and are easy to interface to OLE and COM components on Windows, and some rather popular libraries like CA-Tools (CT) and NanFor (NF) are almost completely covered by compatible libs.

HTH
TonHu