Scheduled Instance Limitation???

[Packya]

Just hung up with a Crystal Care representative and I found out that its not possible to call an existing scheduled instance of a report by dynamically changing the URL to restrict the existing data based on a parameter. Is this true?

An instance is scheduled which included sales data from all states.

Then this report is called by a salesperson in IL based on the following modified URL:

http://myserver/viewrpt.cwr?id=reportid&promptex-state=IL

reportid is the id of the scheduled instance!

Assuming "State" is a parameter in the report should this work or fail?

 

[SurfingGecko]

I would expect a fail. Consider that a scheduled rpeort creates an instance of that report. This 'instance' is a report with saved data, thus there would be no prompting and I suspect the command in the URL would be ignored as I am sure you have found.

Although I have not tried this and am not at a machine to do so, you may have some luck in passing in a new selection formula rather than a parameter. This is tricky though because the formula you specify will be appended to the one in the report, so you need to be clear in what you are asking of the report.

Here is a doc with the available URL commands that you can refer to.

http://support.crystaldecisions.com/communityCS/TechnicalPapers/ce8_urlcommands.pdf

Should also be noted that URL reporting has been deprecated in v9 and will no longer be supported as a reporting method. It doesn't even appear in the v9 documentation.



Cheers,

SurfingGecko

http://www.surfinggeckosoftware.com

Home of Crystal Ease

 

[Packya]

Hi,
Well the interesting part is that it gives an error "Cannot Open SQL Server" and then upon refresh gives another error "Crystal report print engine error" and upon next refresh GIVES THE CORRECT DATA ( A subset of the main report).
When I say refresh I am not refreshing the report....I am refreshing the browser link. I am not sure if this causes the report to go back and get fresh data.

sf also comes up with a similar error...

Is there any good documentation on Processing extensions? Documentation on how those work?

Thanks for the feedback.

 

[SurfingGecko]

The browser refresh will not be able to instruct the report to go back to the source perse, but it should try to rerun the URL.

The refresh in the viewer would send a re-request, but I suspect similar results.

There could be a few things at play. The errors (1 and 2) I suspect are being generated as a result of one another. The database error which could be the result of some missing data connection information (like an on-demand subreport) and the second could be the print engine errorig as a result. The final presentation of the data could be simply the report coming up with its saved data.

Off hand I am not sure of Processing Extension documentation, but you could check the Enterprise Web Developers Guide and perhaps Ken Hamady's site (kenhamady.com)

I'll dig around and see what I can find.

Cheers,

SurfingGecko

http://www.surfinggeckosoftware.com

Home of Crystal Ease