Hi folks,
Our company has settled on Crystal as the reporting engine across all our apps. For our app, we need to be able integrate report generation and delivery with our own RPC mechanism.
I've looked at i-net Crystal-Clear ( and am very impressed. It's a Java solution that can read Crystal .RPT files and generate reports. It's a snap to integrate with on the server side, and their API is designed so that the viewer applet can talk to a proxy, which I implement to send the report request to the server via our RPC mechanism. On the server, I get that request, kick off an engine, who produces the report, and I stream compressed bytes back to client proxy, who hands it to the viewer for display. Pretty nifty.
Now I'd like to try to accomplish the same thing with Crystal tools. Doc seems to suggest that RAS can be used for this purpose, and the advanced edition claims to do request queueing and clustering. Quesions are:
[ul][li]Anybody else tried something like this? Will RAS perform?[/li]
[li]I haven't gotten my hands on the API yet, so I don't know if their viewer will let me get into the middle of the client/RAS exchange...anybody know?[/li]
[li]Are there any gotchas in going this route?[/li]
[li]I've seen a number of problems about changing report DSN/db info on the fly, but haven't seen any solutions yet...any update here?[/li][/ul]
Thanks in advance!
- psynoff
Our company has settled on Crystal as the reporting engine across all our apps. For our app, we need to be able integrate report generation and delivery with our own RPC mechanism.
I've looked at i-net Crystal-Clear ( and am very impressed. It's a Java solution that can read Crystal .RPT files and generate reports. It's a snap to integrate with on the server side, and their API is designed so that the viewer applet can talk to a proxy, which I implement to send the report request to the server via our RPC mechanism. On the server, I get that request, kick off an engine, who produces the report, and I stream compressed bytes back to client proxy, who hands it to the viewer for display. Pretty nifty.
Now I'd like to try to accomplish the same thing with Crystal tools. Doc seems to suggest that RAS can be used for this purpose, and the advanced edition claims to do request queueing and clustering. Quesions are:
[ul][li]Anybody else tried something like this? Will RAS perform?[/li]
[li]I haven't gotten my hands on the API yet, so I don't know if their viewer will let me get into the middle of the client/RAS exchange...anybody know?[/li]
[li]Are there any gotchas in going this route?[/li]
[li]I've seen a number of problems about changing report DSN/db info on the fly, but haven't seen any solutions yet...any update here?[/li][/ul]
Thanks in advance!
- psynoff