How Can you kick off an IBM AS/400 (Iseries) job from a Crystal Report

[Frazey]

HI I don't know if this is possible.

We have a request to provide a Crystal Report where the user will select which fields they want to see. The data resides on AS/400 (DB2). For processing time, it is faster to stage the data on the AS/400.
Ideally, the data staging would kick off from the Crystal Report. How can that be done?

Tia, Frazey

 

[IdoMillet]

Unless you are willing to develop a fairly complex Crystal runtime application to do this, this is not possible with Crystal Designer alone.
One alternative is to give the user an Excel pivot table, allowing them to slice and dice the data as they see fit.

Another alternative is to use one of the 3rd-party Crystal Reports viewers listed at

http://kenhamady.com/bookmarks.html.

At least one of these viewers has an option to load the report data into an interactive Data Grid, allowing the user to select and arrange columns, sorting, filtering, grouping, and summaries. The layout is then saved as a basis for a future session when fresh data is retrieved by the Crystal report.

hth,
- Ido

view, export, burst, email, and schedule Crystal Reports.

http://www.MilletSoftware.com

 

[PeterDimitrov]

Create a stored procedure in the database and base your report on this procedure. If you are looking for a way to dynamically generate data, Crystal reports will be not the best tool because it will retrieve and cache the structure of the data and when it is changed ( for example a column is added or removed) you have to verify the report in design mode in order to see the changes.
If you have a limited number of field combinations for example the user want to see fields ABC, BCDE or ABDE etc, then you can create a subreport for each of the possible cases and show one or another subreport based on the user input. Each subreport will retrieve different set of data. However if you have even 5 fields and you want to allow the user to select any combination of them then you will be in trouble because the possible combinations are 2^5 = 32 .
I would ask the user to provide few combinations of fields and will create a subreport for each one.

There are tools, which might handle the request with or without crystal report (for example using the SQL from the report but retrieving the data directly from the database) The end result will be a grid on the screen, Excel or PDF file and if you are trying to use CR Server this will not work for you.

http://www.R-Tag.com

Viewer and Scheduler for Crystal reports and SSRS.