Is Crystal 8.5 stateless?

[RichS]

We are trying to decide whether or not to use Crystal 8.5 for our reporting needs. We have 2-4 users in the office who will use it and also 5 to 20 who will use it from the web. The problem is the licensing. The 5 user license is just under $400 but it jumps to almost $8,000 for 6-10 users.

According to the sales staff a license is occupied as long as the browser is showing the report. If this is true then the report is not "stateless" and is occupying bandwidth (and also a license). It is not current web technology either.

The sales staff was very polite and for the most part knowledgable but was unclear about the stateless part. Given the difference in price between 5 users and 10 users I need to know if she was correct about the statelessness of the product.

If anyone knows....

Thanks.

Rich

 

[balves]

In ASP, you create instances of objects using Server.CreateObject(). After you create the objects for various Crystal components, you open one of the Crystal viewers (such as Active-X or Java). When the user closes the viewer, the objects are destroyed (or you destroy them in code, I forget...).

While those objects are alive, you're probably using one of the licenses. If the user walks away to lunch, then the license probably still continues to be used.
Brian J. Alves
Email: brian.alves@worldnet.att.net
VB / ASP / Crystal / SQLServer

 

[lwatanabe]

No, Crystal Web Reports are not stateless - at least, not with ASP and the provided samples. In order to reduce some of the processing overhead for users requesting multiple reports, the application and report objects are set in session variables. While these sessions have "timeouts" and may be closed explicitly, if a user closes their browser window without using a logoff function, etc, then the session remains open (and technically in use) until the session times out. Not really the most efficient use of the system, but rewriting rptserver.asp is not the most fun thing , either.

I'm not sure whether this applies to the Web Component Server. Anyone?