Design Question - Universes vs Tables vs Stored Procs

[Videla]

Hi All,

I am new to Crystal Reports. We are working on project with Crystal Reports XI & Business Objects XI. After going through few articles on the net, we found that Crystal reports can be developed using either Universes or Tables or Stored Procedures as a source to it.

Can someone pls throw some light on what is the best way to use and pros & cons of each method.

Thanks
Ravi

 

[paulmarr]

Tables and Stored Procedures are elements in a database - using these objects means you are connecting directly to the database to retrieve records. By far the quickest development wihtin Crystal - but if your database is technical you may need to provide IT support to Crystal designers.

Universes and Business Views are datamodels - "semantic layers" - that sit over the top of the database - allowing IT to link the tables hiding this task from the user - and giving the IT department the ability to rename field names to something more user friendly - for example instead of customer.ASCCMN to customer.customer name. - as well as remove unneeded fields and even creating "custom" tables by using information from multiple tables and combining into one.

Universes and Business Views allow you to employ row level security on your data - only allowing users to see data that they are authorised to see. You can do this from the database with the right technical experience.

So - Security and report design simplicity are 2 major considerations in deciding what to use for your project.

Hope this helps
Cheers
paulmarr

 

[Videla]

Hi Paulmarr..Thanks for your response, It helps.
Let me make few more things clear. Our IT people only design and develop crystal reports for this project. Our reporting requirements are finalized, i mean what kind of filters then want to have in front end (ASP.NET ) and what kind of reports they want to see as output (like first summary on high levle and then drilling down etc.).

So we could write queries on tables or develop stored procedures which will have necessary joins and have business names for the columns as requested in requirmeents. And also we have few security entitlement tables which will specify what data can be viewed by each user. so we can implement data level security with this. can you pls give some more ideas on what is good for this scenario.

Thanks
Ravi

 

[synapsevampire]

You've forgotten to list Views as potential datasources.

Business Views allow for security, and that being the only real advantage I see to them, and that only if you cannot enforce security otherwise.

Tables, Views and SPs all lend themselves well to reusability with other applications, whereas Universes/Business Views are proprietary and require that external apps go through the BO API.

I liken them to the old Crystal Reports Queries by nature, although more powerful, they also lock you in.

If possible, I suggest that you leverage generic Database Objects, such as Table, Views and SPs.

-k