Help using the Distribution Expert to distribute reports

[jcalvin]

Okay. here's the situation.  I am designing reports for an application that will be put on someone elses computer.  Right now i have the app on mine and am able to design the report setting the location of the tables to my c: drive.  Ideally i want to distribute the reports to the person at a later date using the distribution expert to create self contained reports since the user will not have crystal reports.  I want to save the reports without the data and let them refresh off the databases that will be included with the app.  I am not sure where the databases will be located due to the naming conventions of their network.  How can i tell the reports to look for data when i'm not sure where the app will be housed. Or is this even possible.  Is relative naming possible with CR?  If so how would i use it?  Sorry for the muddledness of this.  This is my second day using CR8!  

 

[Guest_imported]

well, if you want to do anything dynamic with the compiled reports....stop.&nbsp;&nbsp;If you want dynamic, you really should create a custom app in VB or something.&nbsp;&nbsp;The compiled reports are very limited when it comes to being flexible.<br><br>

 

[AAP]

I had a similar problem in that I had to write a suite of 100+ reports to be applied to 180+ different databases located on various servers. The way I did this was to modify our reporting app to create the report data subset on a fixed path on the users' PC. Eg. C:\REPORTS. That way I was able to write my reports to all point to the same path, the locaction of the 'real' databases being irelevant.