Crystal Reports Support Group?

[Brueggers]

Anyone know of a Crystal Reports Support group? What an unstable, unpredictable, falling-down clumsy piece of software. They should be ashamed. Sheesh.

 

[Turkbear]

Hi,
Its not always the software
..I have been using CR since version 5 and find it better than most other report writers..

What exactly is giving you such a problem?

 

[Brueggers]

You mean operator error!
I've been with Crystal since 6. So many times there are bugs that defy logic. My limited dealings with the tech support team at Seagate were not successful. I found the work arounds.

My latest hair puller is with CE 8. When you load reports through the CMC it sometimes - but not always respects changes you make on the Object pages tabs. I diligently hit update, or OK when needed only to find missing info when I return or refresh. Also the intermittent problems with the page server losing communication with the cache server. Reboot! Also jumping through hoops trying to publish reports where I've changed the location and driver. It seems that somewhere deep down, Crystal is holding on to hard references about the connection string it was initally given.

Too bad they're the cheapest game in town for the features they offer.

 

[synapsevampire]

Brueggers:

It's the number one product in the world by a large margin. It's breadth covers many areas, and still works with previous versions, given this difficult and expansive realm, I'd say that they've done a very good job.

But yeah, it has weaknesses, though if one is new to the product it's generally because they don't RTFM or make assumptions because it's "only a report writer".

I switched from coding years ago to pure business intelligence (mainly SQL and CR) because straight programming is too simple and dull.

-k

 

[pelajhia]

Also the intermittent problems with the page server losing communication with the cache server.
-you may find some tweaking of the timeouts on these items will fix some of these lapses.

 

[Turkbear]

Hi, I did not mean operator error ( at least not always) . The OS, the hardware, the network connections, etc all can contribute to problems with software, but usually it is the software that gets the blame.
We are currently running 2 instances of CE 8.5 on Windows 2000 Advanced Servers with about 500 reports deployed -
It has been very stable ( except when I, without bothering to read the docs, attempted to move one of the servers to a new domain..Don't do that! ).

My experience with CE8, however, was not good...It, too often, hung up and stopped all access to the web server it was running under.

CE is complex and there are many factors that need to be considered when debugging problems, but I have been happy with it, and with their support, so far.

 

[synapsevampire]

pelajhia: I haven't had one for months since the last service pack, did you apply it?

-k

 

[Brueggers]

Thanks for the suggestions!

We are behind on the updates so I can't adjust the timeout - but I think you're right Pelajhia that the default 20 minute timeout holds on to connections that are long since closed and I run into licensing limits.

 

[Guyute97]

Brueggers,
You are correct it is a 20 min timeout. Explanation from Crystal was that it only cached reports while the connection was open so the default was a holdover from when systems were slower and caching was more important.

I applied the service pack and set the timeout to 3 min and have avoided licensing problems since.

 

[pelajhia]

Thanks synapsevampire; I am not doing badly with the timeouts, however I have been waiting for a test server to arrive before applying anything. It just arrived about a week ago and I am going to be able to apply those soon (I did need the reminder, however .
I was thinkiing in terms of the registry key values which may be increased to get the various servers to wait for each other - if you have long running reports (I have a couple).
In fact, one of these suckers takes about 15 minutes during early morning, but takes over an hour sometimes late in the day (db is doing lots of other things..?)"THEY" are working on it. Hee-hee.