How to include Editable field in Crystal Report ?

[whizzz]

hello friends...

Suppose I have a Remarks column on report & I want to provide the user with the facility to edit that particular

column with his remark.How do I proceed with this ?? Pls give some ideas

thanks,
smitha

 

[Ngolem]

in short...you cannot do this in Crystal.

I have done something like this for a sales manager. He wanted a sales report done by salesman, sent to the respective salesman, who would remark on his/her sales and send him a return copy with the information...and it was supposed to be paperless.

What I did was compose a CR report that exported to EXCEL. Each salesman received their report in this format (which they were used to using....the salesman filled in his comments/projections and e-mailed their completed spreadsheets to the sales manager.

Jim Broadbent

The quality of the answer is directly proportional to the quality of the problem statement!

 

[FVTrainer]

Here's another idea. It would require the following:

a) that you have permission to write to a database that all users of the report would have access to and could in turn feed the report

b) you are distributing the report via either the RDC, RAS, or CE.

If you are using the RDC in a vb (or C) app, you could use the Crystal Viewer events to monitor the user interaction (has the user clicked on the field I want him to add comments to?) and, using the click_event, launch a dialog that would allow the user to enter data, write that data to the database, and upon the next refresh of the report the comments would show up.

If you are using a web based approach (the RDC on the web, RAS or CE, you'd have to hyperlink the field to an asp page that would do the same thing.)

 

[synapsevampire]

Smitha: It's a bad idea to use Crystal as an application development environment, if you have a programmer on staff, have them write something up, Crystal is for presenting business intelligence (as the buzz words currently go), not for providing data entry. Crystal does all for parameters, meaning that at the time you invoke the report, someone could write up some comments, and then you could easily prevent them in the report, but writing back to the database would require a customized stored procedure and a subreport.

There are a number of ways that you could approach this.

But that's similar to trying to make Word run as a calculator, doable, but why not just use a program designed to be used as a calculator?

-k

 

[FVTrainer]

Hey sv,

I'm just curious. My suggestion, which may not be practical for Smitha's situation (or many others), is primarily theoretical; that is, I myself haven't done it in a production environment. But I've seen other developers do things similar to what I suggested, and haven't seen any serious drawbacks. In your experience, have you seen memory problems or anything detrimental to an app when using the Crystal Viewer events?

 

[synapsevampire]

Hiya FV: I've never tried it, theoretically it might be sound, but that's a pretty expensive way to perform data entry (using the Crystal engine and then clicking).

If a user needs to add comments to a table, I'd fill a grid control with the data, allow them to enter the information, and then launch the presentation layer (Crystal) when the data is correct.

-k