What exactly do we need to post reports to the web? 1

[Craino]

We currently have a Management Reports application that is built upon Crystal Reports stored in an Access database. Lots of problems with it. To increase ease of use, and get rid of problems, we decided to migrate the reports to our Intranet.

We bought two copies of CR 9 Advanced, which included (we thought) the Crystal Enterprise software needed to support this. Now we're not so sure what we got, not to mention what we need. The Crystal Decision website is very confusing, as are a lot of the forum messages, to us beginners.

Can someone layout, in plain english, what exactly we need to simply migrate some existing Crystal Reports to be viewed on our Intranet website? As we are considering making this our reporting platform in the future, any additional insights would be a bonus and greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance.

 

[Tracey]

i work with cr8.5, which ships with crystal enterprise 8.

I believe CR9 works in a similar way, although i understand there are some licencing issues you will need to look at.

with a web server and crystal enterprise configured and running, your existing reports should be able to be linked to from a html page or asp or cgi app etc.

if u use a web server other than iis, u will still need iis installed and running to install crystal enterprise. (as far as i know crystal are still claiming apache is not compatible with windows)

a link would look like:
<a href=&quot;http:\\servername\cgi-bin\wcscgi.exe\reports\reportname.rpt?param0=blah&param1=blah1&quot;>link</a>

where wcscgi.exe is the crystal web connector, reports is a virtual directory in which the reports are stored, and param0 and param1 are parameters passed to the report (parameters you dont wish your users to select during runtime)

its pretty overwhelming getting kicked off, and yes crystal decisions site is difficult to navigate. I started crystal two years ago, and this site is the main place i use for help, as i work alone.

IMHO Tek-tips is the quickest and best place for answers, and you wont be judged for &quot;silly newby questions&quot;.... i still ask them lol

i run apache 2.36 on win 2000 with crystal.. delivering reports over the web from a cgi .exe.

 

[Craino]

Tracey,

Thanks for your reply - it was helpful information, but I *think* we're trying to answer a more basic question: Did we even get Crystal Enterprise?

In the box with CR 9 Advanced, there was a separate disk, as advertised, which wasn't labelled specifically as CE, but spoke to web reporting. Looks like it is the RAS? - Report Application Server. We're really trying to sort through what we got vs. CE vs. what we want to do which at the current time is simply port some existing Crystal Reports to our Intranet.

Any additional thoughts you could share would be greatly appreciated.

thanks in advance...

 

[Tracey]

ok it seems they have slightly changed the web stuff, which is why i am not installing my upgrade.

this is an exerpt from hammerman's newsletter:

The Professional, Developer and Advanced editions come with a second disk called RAS (Report Application Server). This has the software needed to web-enable Crystal Report files. It contains a &quot;lite&quot; application to help get the reports on the web. This&quot;free&quot; version is intended to be used for testing and development. When you are ready to &quot;go live&quot;, you are encouraged to upgrade to the Advanced edition or to Crytal Enterprise. The RAS in the Professional and Developer editions have three user licences. Like the concuurrent access licenses (CALs) in Crystal Enterprise 8.0, additional users will get a &quot;no resources available&quot; message. However, the RAS licenses are only used when generating a page of information and then are automatically released. Therefore 3 RAS licenses should be more useful then 5 CALs.


u can check that site at

http://www.hammerman.com

 

[gtf]

You can still purchase CR v8.5 which includes the free copy of CE Standard with 5 concurrent licenses. I was confused about this until I talked with someone from CD sales. I have not used RAS but it sounds like it is not the best product for distributing CR's on the web in a production environment.

GTF

 

[synapsevampire]

CE 9 was supposed to be out in December, not sure if they're on target.

There's a great deal on CE 8.5 right now, $8500 for 5 licenses, providing that you do an upgrade (which you can do from the freebie CE 8 that came with CE 8.5).

I'd contact Crystal and tell them that you'd like to return CR 9, and that you want CR 8.5 (giving you CE 8), which you can use to purchase ce 8.5 through a reseller channel for $8500.

OK, great deal is a relative thing...

You might have a look at milletsoftware.com, Ido's a regular contributor here, and has Cut/Visual Cut which might serve your needs for a whole lot less.

-k

http://www.informeddatadecisions.com

kai@informeddatadecisions.com

 

[synapsevampire]

Oooops:

This:

(which you can do from the freebie CE 8 that came with CE 8.5).

Should be:

(which you can do from the freebie CE 8 that came with CR 8.5).

http://www.informeddatadecisions.com

kai@informeddatadecisions.com

 

[Craino]

Thanks for all the great feedback from everyone. That really helped clear things up for me. I also called Crystal Decisions directly and talked to one of the tech reps, so I wanted to share that conversation back with the group.

Our conversation was more on the technical capabilities side than the licensing side, so if anyone still has questions concerning licensing, I'd suggest calling Crystal. The person I spoke to was very helpful.

Basically, she said the RAS included in the Professional and Advanced editions CAN be used in a production environment for web delivery of reports. The obvious caveat is one of scale and load. It is not intended for mission-critical or heavily intensive applications. But for an environment where all you are looking to do is migrate a set of reports to your intranet, and you are a small to medium sized company, RAS should fill the bill.

I hope this helps.

 

[Tracey]

that all sounds ok..
still.. keep us informed of the obstacles you encounter? I would be interested to know how different it is from Crystal Enterprise.

 

[Craino]

Tracey,

I will certainly try to keep you all informed as to what works and what doesn't with the product. As I mentioned, we have it up and running on our test Intranet, and once we slogged through the initial configuation issues, it actually works like a charm and is pretty simple to use (all of this I'm told by my developer as I'm just the dumb management guy).

You can tweak the UI - we changed some colors to match our identity scheme and put our logo into the banners. The conversion from CR 6 to CR9 RAS is doesn't take long at all.

One issue I've run into in usability testing concerns printing. In our little home-grown application that was used previously, once the user had the report displayed, they just hit the print button and it went to their default printer. With the RAS as we have it currently configured, you hit the print button, you get a screen with instructions on what is going to happen next, you click ok, a .pdf file downloads, Acrobat fires up, then you print from Acrobat. I have another thread started (thread782-399002) to see if anyone can make this flow better.

I understand why it is happening, as the report is &quot;on the web&quot; and needs to be downloaded locally to print, but there are lots of websites that have fully functional printing capabilities right on the page. I'm hopeful there is a better say.

 

[kopkeje]

Because of one colleague's favorable experience with Crystal Reports 7 in a previous job, we bought Crystal Reports 8.5 for our latest project. As we understand it, Crystal Reports 7 allowed unlimited access to &quot;unmanaged reports&quot; through the Web. And we were quite satisfied with Crystal Reports 8.5 when we used it to develop seven reports that derive data from some rather substantial Oracle stored procedures. But then we tried to figure out how to deliver the reports across the web....

All we want to do is use URL parameters to make Crystal Reports generate reports on demand and display them in the ActiveX viewer under Internet Explorer 5. After quite a bit of confusion with the documentaion, we were able to accomplish this with Crystal Enterprise 8 --- a five-user license for which comes free with Crystal Reports 8.5.

Now that we're ready to put these reports into production, we've discovered that a Crystal Enterprise 8 license for our two-CPU IIS server would cost $90,000. Needless to say, a $90,000 upgrade to a $500 product is not going to fly with our management.

A salesperson at Crystal Decisions suggested that we upgrade to Crystal Reports 9 with RAS, as described by earlier contributors to this thread. With the version of RAS that comes with the Advanced Edition of Crystal Reports 9, we can have only three simultaneous processes, but since that edition of RAS queues additional requests instead of rejecting them, the salesperson thought that the free three-process license for RAS might keep more users happy than the free five-user license for Crystal Enterprise 8.

After two weeks of fruitless experimentation, we finally evoked the following message from Crystal Decisions' technical support people today: &quot;Crystal Reports 9 does not come with the required DLL’s to load an RPT file directly over the URL line the way Crystal 7, 8, and 8.5 did. Calling an RPT file over the URL line will require you to have Crystal Enterprise installed.&quot; Of course, no extant version of Crystal Enterprise will work with Crystal Reports 9, so we're back where we started. In other words, it appears that for the simple &quot;unmanaged reports&quot; invoked by URL parameters, the capabilities of Crystal Reports are diminishing with each successive release.

If anyone has found a work-around for these limitations, we are all ears. In the mean time, we are investigating alternative solutions that don't involve Crystal Reports.

 

[lrdavis]

We returned our CR 9.0 Pro because there is no way to run unmanaged reports by calling a .rpt file directly as we were doing in CR 8.5 with CE. They will be bundling a lite version of CE sometime soon but that upgrade will cost at least a $1000 more than the basic Pro upgrade. I think they are becoming even more large corporation oriented and forgetting about the needs of smaller companies.

 

[Tracey]

well, i use CE8 that came with CR8.5 to deliver my reports EXACLY as i did with CR8 WCS.

But then.. i doubt i well ever get more than 5 users at once. for now anyway.

 

[kopkeje]

After a lot more consultation, experimentation, and frustration, we've devised a way to at least temporarily make do with the &quot;free&quot; five-user license for Crystal Enterprise 8.0.

First some background: If you use a Crystal viewer, Crystal Enterprise transmits only one page of a report at a time to the browser. Consequently, each user has to hog a license for as long as he keeps a report open, since Crystal Enterprise never knows when the user might need to receive another page from the server. What's worse, by default, Crystal Enterprise doesn't relinquish the license until after twenty minutes of inactivity.

On the other hand, if you use the Adobe Acrobat Reader, Crystal Enterprise transmits the entire report to the browser at one time. Furthermore, Crystal's Web site has a downloadable patch that enables you to set the default timeout to something other than 20 minutes.

We have set up our Web application to specify that the embedded Crystal reports should be generated in Adobe Acrobat format, and we have set the Crystal Enterprise timeout period to one minute. In our situation, five licenses that time out one minute after downloading a complete report are adequate most of the time. If by some chance, six people do try to generate reports simultaneously, one of them will still get the regrettable Crystal logon screen. But if that hapless individual just closes the logon screen and waits a minute, chances are he'll get his report on the next try.

This is an ugly workaround, but it has enabled us to at least get something into production until we can investigate alternatives. Crystal Clear by i-net is the alternative that looks most promising at the moment, since it supplants both Crystal Reports and Crystal Enterprise and costs about $1600 for an unlimited user license.

 

[Naith]

Hey Kopkeje,

Be careful in the parallel you draw between Crystal Clear and Crystal Enterprise. They both do similar things, but they're not necessarily six-of-one half-a-dozen-of-the-other for all environments.

Crystal Clear comes into it's own for small tactical applications where the demand for reporting is low or periodic. Enterprise offers greater functionality and is better suited to global projects or projects where there are high reporting requirements.

Crystal Clear does not support secure user access, individual report security, personalisation, fail over support, load balancing and redundancy, or clustered server environment - so no self-healing internet architecture. It does however allow for embedding of Crystal Reports in your java applications.

Where Crystal Clear still manages to offer a zero client environment, and is platform independent, it lacks the functionality, security, and scalability of it's more expensive Enterprise buddy.

I don't support any one of these solutions above the other. But I do think each has it's place. Before you opt for one or the other, you might want to first gauge your current or likely report traffic, and how this will be affected in later weeks or months.

Regarding your Adobe experience; you're right in that Adobe exports export the entire report prior to making viewing available, but this is true of all exports in all formats. Once a report has been exported, it fundamentally loses it's online reliance, unless a hyperlink to another report is activated on it.

Naith

 

[fairozkhan]

Hi!

Tracey

I read your replay containing the following
[
i run apache 2.36 on win 2000 with crystal.. delivering reports over the web from a cgi .exe.
]

Please give me steps to configure the apache server and crystal report 8.5 on windows 2000, so that i am able to access the report in this form

<a href=&quot;http:\\servername\cgi-bin\wcscgi.exe\reports\reportname.rpt?param0=blah¶m1=blah1&quot;>link</a>

Thanks!
fairoz

 

[Maximizer]

Shop around! I have contacted Programmers Paradise and received a much more attractive price than from Crystal Decisions for CE8.5 upgrades.

Thanks


James Keep, A.C.E.
Crystal Reports(tm) Certified Consultant 8.5 (CRCC)
CMRC
Crystal Decisions Business Partner
Montreal, Qc, Canada

http://www.cmrc.qc.ca