Upgrade CR8.5 to CR10

[victora]

I've been using CR8.5 Developer Edition for couple of years now and although it meets our needs, there are some feature I like/wish to have.
Is upgrading to CR10 worth a try?. I have an offer from Business Objects mentioning all the neat features of the new version.

Any comment/experience on CR10?

Thanks

 

[synapsevampire]

There are a number of features that should make it worthwhile.

Here's the comparison listing:

http://www.businessobjects.com/products/reporting/crystalreports/technical.asp

Specifically:

http://www.businessobjects.com/global/pdf/products/crystalreports/cr10_feat_ver_ed.pdf

The biggest plus I've found to CR 9/10 is the Add Command with parameters functionality which allows for pasting in REAL SQL and applying parameters directly to that SQL.

But there are lots of other niceties.

-k

 

[whitd01]

You do need to be careful though if you are using a lot of views with outer joins. Up to Crystal 8.5 it treats the views as databases rather then views. 9.0 and greater actually evaluate the code within a view and may require that you combine your views in order to make the report run. Just my 5 cents

 

[victora]

Thanks guys...
Actually I'm looking at a feature like doing couple of pre-processing jobs/runs before coming up with the final report. A good example of that scenario is a complex report that incorporate different data from a prior run/processing. These runs involve its own 'complex' extract/processing...Then finally, collect all these results and print the final report.

Like outputting a couple of SQL tables, then lastly, a final run of the main report. All of these on a stream of jobs submitted as a single job, the user does not even know it involves many steps. I guess I tend to look at it from an old programmer's perspective from a forgotten era. (i.e. mainframe, green screen, S36, AS400) Dead is it?

Anyway, thanks for all the replies...

 

[fredp1]

Hi Victoria,

With regards to your last post, their are 2 main concepts you can use and non of them directly relate to a version of Crystal.
The first concept is a Datawarehouse, where you can pre process the data and create fact and dimention tables to make a potentailly complicated/slow report run fast. This would normally involve some data extraction and stored procedures/views to create your final table(s).

The second concept, is dependant on how fast/accessable/complex the data/query is, you can call a stored procedure from within Crystal. The sp would then 'stream' the steps to produce the desired results for Crystal.

Its funny how the old techniques are still very applicable today. The choice of your db just makes the process a little easier.

I've been using v8.5 for a while and its stable, but the newer features in 9 and 10 will make life a little easier.

Good luck
Fred