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		<title>Crystal Server 2011 &#8211; 2nd impressions</title>
		<link>http://pursuittechnology.wordpress.com/2012/02/08/crystal-server-2011-2nd-impressions/</link>
		<comments>http://pursuittechnology.wordpress.com/2012/02/08/crystal-server-2011-2nd-impressions/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 08 Feb 2012 17:16:12 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>andrewmbaines</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Crystal Reports]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Crystal Server]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[crystal reports]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Crystal Reports Server]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[crystal server 2011]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[Last August, I wrote my first blog on Crystal Server 2011 giving my first impressions, I followed this up with a discussion on the merits of upgrading from Crystal Reports Server 2008 to Crystal Server 2011. I&#8217;m now sufficiently bruised and battered to give second impressions following my first migration. I&#8217;d forgotten the details of [...]<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=pursuittechnology.wordpress.com&amp;blog=16714943&amp;post=86&amp;subd=pursuittechnology&amp;ref=&amp;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Last August, I wrote my first blog on <a title="Crystal Server 2011 – First Impressions" href="http://pursuittechnology.wordpress.com/2011/08/07/crystal-server-2011-first-impressions/">Crystal Server 2011 giving my first impressions</a>, I followed this up with a discussion on the merits of upgrading from <a title="Crystal Reports Server 2008 – Time to upgrade to 2011?" href="http://pursuittechnology.wordpress.com/2011/11/02/crystal-reports-server-2008-time-to-upgrade-to-2011/">Crystal Reports Server 2008 to Crystal Server 2011</a>. I&#8217;m now sufficiently bruised and battered to give second impressions following my first migration.</p>
<p>I&#8217;d forgotten the details of my earlier posts, so on re-reading, I&#8217;m feeling remarkably prescient!</p>
<p>Here&#8217;s a comment from my First Impressions post regarding the original release already being at SP2:</p>
<p><span style="color:#808080;">&#8220;<em>Service Pack 2?! Isn’t this fresh off the press? OK, so select customers have been running BI 4.0 since early this year, so maybe it’s a sign that this is mature software. But two service packs in 6 months? I’m glad I wasn’t running the original release.On the other hand, imagine if Microsoft release Windows 8 this time next year after a 6 month testing phase with select customers. The first shrink wrap installs as Windows 8 SP2. Imaging the howls of derision! Let’s give SAP the benefit of the doubt for now.&#8221;</em></span></p>
<p>Looks like I was wrong to give SAP the benefit of the doubt. Try this for a bug:<em> It is not possible to migrate from an earlier release if there are any instances of any report that aren&#8217;t in rpt format</em>. That&#8217;s right, read it again. If you have scheduled a report to pdf, Word, Excel or text the migration wizard will fail. It won&#8217;t just skip the bad instance, it will fail completely and not import anything. There are only 2 workarounds; delete all the rogue instances, or migrate a few folders/reports at a time. The 2nd option doesn&#8217;t really work as any non-rpt files in user&#8217;s personal folders will cause the migration to fail, and they&#8217;re seen as a dependency.</p>
<p>So despite an incredibly long beta program, and two Service Packs, the vast majority of existing installations won&#8217;t migrate. To make life even more difficult, it&#8217;s no longer possible to migrate by just copying instances and changing the location of the system database &#8211; you have to use the new migration wizard.</p>
<p>This has been fixed in the latest fix pack for the larger products, but fix packs aren&#8217;t available for Crystal Server. Smaller installations will have to wait until SP3 which is mooted for March.</p>
<p>Another comment from my earlier blogs:</p>
<p><span style="color:#808080;"><strong>&#8220;</strong><strong>Minimum system requirements of 6GB RAM</strong>. That compares to 2GB for the 2008 release. From experience to date, 6GB really is the absolute minimum. I’d be more comfortable with double that, which would compare well with a typical 2008 installation with 4GB.&#8221;</span></p>
<p>Sad to say that I was 100% correct on that point. Crystal Server will install with 6GB RAM, but that&#8217;s about it. Anything more than a couple of users and memory use goes through the roof. Assume 12GB minimum, 16GB if you&#8217;re a heavy user.</p>
<p>And another comment:</p>
<p><span style="color:#808080;">&#8220;<strong>64 bit only</strong>. Yes, I know I mentioned this in the good stuff too, but every silver lining has a cloud. If you have an obscure ODBC driver, it’s not going to work as only 64 bit ODBC drivers will work.&#8221;</span></p>
<p>Only half right there &#8211; if you&#8217;re using classic Crystal Reports with regular connections to a database, you&#8217;ll find that the reports run as 32 bit processes, so need 32 bit database drivers. It&#8217;s only the system database that must be 64 bit, and the new meta-layer stuff.</p>
<p>Last one:</p>
<p><span style="color:#808080;">&#8220;If you use InfoView a lot, are happy to train your users in the new BI Launch Pad, and have budget for a new server, just upgrade now.&#8221;</span></p>
<p>Really badly wrong, I&#8217;m afraid. Chances are your upgrade won&#8217;t work!</p>
<p>So, to upgrade or not to upgrade? SP3 should be out soon, assuming that fixes the migration problems, then work through my earlier posting to see if the upgrade is for you.</p>
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			<media:title type="html">andrewmbaines</media:title>
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		<title>Crystal Reports Server 2008 &#8211; Time to upgrade to 2011?</title>
		<link>http://pursuittechnology.wordpress.com/2011/11/02/crystal-reports-server-2008-time-to-upgrade-to-2011/</link>
		<comments>http://pursuittechnology.wordpress.com/2011/11/02/crystal-reports-server-2008-time-to-upgrade-to-2011/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 02 Nov 2011 17:22:57 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>andrewmbaines</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Crystal Report Design]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Crystal Reports for Enterprise]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Crystal Server]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Software]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Uncategorized]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://pursuittechnology.wordpress.com/?p=74</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[I had a call this morning from my accounts software vendor (Intuit Quickbooks Pro since you ask). They were trying to sell me the upgrade to their latest release. Nothing exceptional in that, and little to do with Crystal Server, but it did get me thinking about upgrades in general, which led me to thinking [...]<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=pursuittechnology.wordpress.com&amp;blog=16714943&amp;post=74&amp;subd=pursuittechnology&amp;ref=&amp;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>I had a call this morning from my accounts software vendor (Intuit Quickbooks Pro since you ask). They were trying to sell me the upgrade to their latest release. Nothing exceptional in that, and little to do with Crystal Server, but it did get me thinking about upgrades in general, which led me to thinking about Crystal Server 2011.</p>
<p>I&#8217;m mostly happy with Quickbooks. I generate invoices, monitor payments, bank accounts, sales etc. The difficulty for  Intuit, is that my happiness means that I&#8217;m not about to switch to Sage or another competitor, but it also means that I&#8217;m not ready to upgrade to the newer release. It doesn&#8217;t cost much, but there&#8217;s the time involved, and an element of risk &#8211; if it messes up my data file, I can revert to backup, but if I don&#8217;t notice for a couple of months, what then? So, I carry on with 4 year old software running on a Windows XP Virtual Machine. Invoices go out, payments come in, life goes on.</p>
<p>Then I got to thinking about my relationship with Microsoft. I subscribe to the Partner Action Pack from them for about £300 per year. This gives me everything I need (plus more) to run my business. My PCs and laptops always have the latest release of Windows and Office &#8211; why not, I can install at my leisure and there&#8217;s no risk. However, my main server is still running Windows Small Business Server 2008 &#8211; one release behind the current SBS 2011. The difference? <strong>Risk</strong>. Upgrading SBS is not a trivial task as it involved not only your entire domain, but also your Exchange Server (Blackberry Server too in my case). It&#8217;s a lot to mess up.</p>
<p><em>Finally</em>, we get to Crystal Server! Hand on heart, I consider Crystal Server 2011 to be the best solution to small/medium company and departmental reporting currently on the market. Anyone running the XI release or earlier needs to upgrade sharpish &#8211; the 2011 release really is that good. However, that question mark is in the title for a reason!</p>
<p>Let&#8217;s look at the good stuff first (this isn&#8217;t a review, plenty of other places to find one of those):</p>
<ol>
<li><strong>BI Launch Pad.</strong> New release, so as ever a new name for the user web site. It still has the same failing as every previous release &#8211; when you login for the first time, it really isn&#8217;t obvious where you&#8217;re supposed to go next. That&#8217;s a training issue. However, once you&#8217;re past that first login, the ease of use is far better than any of the previous releases, with no more guessing about where right click may or may not work.</li>
<li><strong>Lifecycle Management</strong>. The improved ability to publish reports across multiple servers is great for installations with separate development, test &amp; live servers. (Hang on, we&#8217;re talking about small companies here!)</li>
<li><strong>64 bit</strong>, so can handle bigger data sets (Hang on, we&#8217;re talking about small companies here!)</li>
<li>There&#8217;s so much good stuff in number 1, that there&#8217;s no need for more! I could have created a long list including the alerts, improved dashboards, but this isn&#8217;t a review.</li>
</ol>
<p>Before we look at the bad stuff, let&#8217;s look at the typical usage of Crystal Reports Server 2008 (remember, we&#8217;re talking small/medium companies):</p>
<ul>
<li>The typical user needs the information in the reports to do their job, they&#8217;re not data analysts.</li>
<li>There are a handful of office/home based workers who view reports through InfoView.</li>
<li>There are a few more using SharePoint.</li>
<li>The rest just receive a report in pdf format as an attachment in an email.</li>
</ul>
<p>Now, the bad stuff:</p>
<ol>
<li><strong>Minimum system requirements of 6GB RAM</strong>. That compares to 2GB for the 2008 release. From experience to date, 6GB really is the absolute minimum. I&#8217;d be more comfortable with double that, which would compare well with a typical 2008 installation with 4GB.</li>
<li><strong>64 bit only</strong>. Yes, I know I mentioned this in the good stuff too, but every silver lining has a cloud. If you have an obscure ODBC driver, it&#8217;s not going to work as only 64 bit ODBC drivers will work.</li>
<li><strong>New hardware.</strong> Combining 1 &amp; 2, chances are you&#8217;ll need new hardware. A lot of small companies reuse an old server for their reporting server (lots of overnight scheduling), not this time.</li>
<li><strong>No support for IIS</strong> (Microsoft&#8217;s web server). Not a bad thing in it&#8217;s own right, but it does make configuring security with Active Directory more long winded and more complex &#8211; Kerberos isn&#8217;t for the faint hearted. My understanding is that this isn&#8217;t a temporary situation as in the previous two releases where the initial release had no IIS support.</li>
<li><strong>Nothing new in Crystal Reports</strong> 2011. OK, not quite true, but near enough. The effort has gone into the new Crystal Reports for Enterprise, which isn&#8217;t as functional yet. For a typical installation it will remain unused.</li>
</ol>
<p>So what does all this mean for our typical users mentioned above? For the user with InfoView, they&#8217;ll need training and it&#8217;s change. In the end, they view the same reports. For the SharePoint user, they probably won&#8217;t notice the difference either. For those receiving reports by email, no difference.</p>
<p>Before coming to any decision, you need to consider my two friends from the start of this article; risk &amp; cost. If you currently have a support contract, the &#8216;only&#8217; cost is installation and training. Risk should be low, unless you do an in-place upgrade (just don&#8217;t).</p>
<p>To upgrade or not then. Doesn&#8217;t sound too positive so far, does it? It really depends upon how well you fit into my typical user description, and whether or not upgrade should be the only question:</p>
<ul>
<li>If you use InfoView a lot, are happy to train your users in the new BI Launch Pad, and have budget for a new server, just upgrade now.</li>
<li>If you use mostly SharePoint or a similar portal, find out what more can be done. This is the advert bit &#8211; give me a call to discuss improving SharePoint integration, you can manage licenses better and have a seamless interface.</li>
<li>If you&#8217;re just emailing reports as pdf, you&#8217;re really not going to notice any difference. That doesn&#8217;t mean you shouldn&#8217;t do anything though! Get some training or consultancy to see how much more you could be doing &#8211; you could surprise yourself and even improve the way you do business. At the very least, you&#8217;ll get better value out of your existing software investment.</li>
</ul>
<p>Perhaps I&#8217;ll even attend a Quickbooks training course and work out how to get profit by rep rather than just by customer. I hope the Quickbooks salesman isn&#8217;t reading this.</p>
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			<media:title type="html">andrewmbaines</media:title>
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		<title>Has it been 4 years already?</title>
		<link>http://pursuittechnology.wordpress.com/2011/11/01/has-it-been-4-years-already/</link>
		<comments>http://pursuittechnology.wordpress.com/2011/11/01/has-it-been-4-years-already/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 01 Nov 2011 14:32:43 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>andrewmbaines</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Uncategorized]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://pursuittechnology.wordpress.com/?p=68</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Just finished off the accounts for another year end. I can&#8217;t quite believe it&#8217;s been 4 years since I finally took the plunge and &#8216;went freelance&#8217;. It&#8217;s been a record year based upon pretty much every metric I can think off, so a big thank you to all my customers, partners, and even a couple [...]<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=pursuittechnology.wordpress.com&amp;blog=16714943&amp;post=68&amp;subd=pursuittechnology&amp;ref=&amp;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Just finished off the accounts for another year end. I can&#8217;t quite believe it&#8217;s been 4 years since I finally took the plunge and &#8216;went freelance&#8217;.</p>
<p>It&#8217;s been a record year based upon pretty much every metric I can think off, so a <span style="color:#ff0000;">big thank you</span> to all my customers, partners, and even a couple of competitors.</p>
<p>Next, a huge thank you to SAP. Their social marketing programme late last year had a profound impact on the way we conduct business on the Internet. I can honestly say that 70% of new business this year is directly related to the changes we put in place due to the programme. They resulted in improved search engine rankings, and more business. Next time someone mutters Web 2.0, I&#8217;ll approach the discussion with a more open mind.</p>
<p>Finally, any regrets? Only two. First that I didn&#8217;t do it sooner. Second, if I had known four years ago what I know now, I&#8217;d have done a few things differently.</p>
<p>Here&#8217;s to the next 4, thank you.</p>
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			<media:title type="html">andrewmbaines</media:title>
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		<title>Duplicating Parameter Fields in Crystal Reports</title>
		<link>http://pursuittechnology.wordpress.com/2011/08/18/duplicating-parameter-fields-in-crystal-reports/</link>
		<comments>http://pursuittechnology.wordpress.com/2011/08/18/duplicating-parameter-fields-in-crystal-reports/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 18 Aug 2011 14:34:41 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>andrewmbaines</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Crystal Report Design]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Software]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[business objects]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[crystal reports; hints and tips]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[Nothing major today, just a little tip. One of the things I&#8217;ve found useful in Crystal Reports is the option to duplicate a formula or SQL Expression. This allows you to swiftly reuse logic from an existing formula. Slight frustration has been the inability to duplicate a parameter &#8211; especially if you have created a [...]<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=pursuittechnology.wordpress.com&amp;blog=16714943&amp;post=47&amp;subd=pursuittechnology&amp;ref=&amp;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Nothing major today, just a little tip.<br />
One of the things I&#8217;ve found useful in Crystal Reports is the option to duplicate a formula or SQL Expression. This allows you to swiftly reuse logic from an existing formula.<br />
Slight frustration has been the inability to duplicate a parameter &#8211; especially if you have  created a long list of parameter values. Solution &#8211; create a 2nd report, copy and paste the parameter into this new report. Rename in the new report, then copy and paste back. Job done, duplicate parameter created.</p>
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			<media:title type="html">andrewmbaines</media:title>
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		<title>Crystal Server 2011 &#8211; First Impressions</title>
		<link>http://pursuittechnology.wordpress.com/2011/08/07/crystal-server-2011-first-impressions/</link>
		<comments>http://pursuittechnology.wordpress.com/2011/08/07/crystal-server-2011-first-impressions/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Sun, 07 Aug 2011 13:30:47 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>andrewmbaines</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Crystal Reports for Enterprise]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Crystal Server]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[business objects]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[crystal reports]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[crystal reports for enterprise]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[crystal server 2011]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[After the longest beta programme since time began, the new release of Crystal Reports Server (now just Crystal Server) was finally released to shrink-wrap last week. I&#8217;ve checked my diary, and this is almost 6 months since the &#8216;release&#8217; date! Off the record, it&#8217;s nearly a year since I was told to expect the release. [...]<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=pursuittechnology.wordpress.com&amp;blog=16714943&amp;post=48&amp;subd=pursuittechnology&amp;ref=&amp;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>After the longest beta programme since time began, the new release of Crystal Reports Server (now just Crystal Server) was finally released to shrink-wrap last week. I&#8217;ve checked my diary, and this is almost 6 months since the &#8216;release&#8217; date! Off the record, it&#8217;s nearly a year since I was told to expect the release. Let&#8217;s hope the time was well spent!</p>
<p>There are plenty of places to see list of new features, so I&#8217;m not going to repeat that here. I&#8217;m going to give my first impressions from the perspective of an independent consultant who&#8217;s been working with Crystal for most of his adult life.Yes, it&#8217;s supposed to be slightly irreverent.</p>
<p>I&#8217;ll follow up this blog with actual usability stuff once I&#8217;ve had feedback from my customers about their experiences, and I&#8217;ve had some time to do &#8216;real work&#8217; rather than just playing.</p>
<h3>First up, the install process:</h3>
<p><a href="http://pursuittechnology.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/bi4.png"><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-58" title="SP2" src="http://pursuittechnology.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/bi4.png?w=600" alt=""   /></a></p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p>Service Pack 2?! Isn&#8217;t this fresh off the press? OK, so select customers have been running BI 4.0 since early this year, so maybe it&#8217;s a sign that this is mature software. But two service packs in 6 months? I&#8217;m glad I wasn&#8217;t running the original release.</p>
<p>On the other hand, imagine if Microsoft release Windows 8 this time next year after a 6 month testing phase with select customers. The first shrink wrap installs as Windows 8 SP2. Imaging the howls of derision!</p>
<p>Let&#8217;s give SAP the benefit of the doubt for now.</p>
<p>It&#8217;s also version 14 &#8211; so superstitious to skip 13, or maybe the delay is due to my sleeping through version 13?</p>
<h3>Some good news:</h3>
<p><a href="http://pursuittechnology.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/bi3.png"><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-57" title="Checks" src="http://pursuittechnology.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/bi3.png?w=600" alt=""   /></a></p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p>I&#8217;ve always liked the way that Microsoft have checks for pre-reqs when you install software. Saves so much pain and reconfiguration later. Nice to see this here, I lose count of the number of times I send a list of pre-reqs to a customer before an installation to find they&#8217;ve not been done &#8211; this should save a lot of time.</p>
<h3>More good news &#8211; .Net SDK</h3>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p><a href="http://pursuittechnology.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/bi2.png"><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-56" title="Installer" src="http://pursuittechnology.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/bi2.png?w=600" alt=""   /></a></p>
<p>Tucked away in the very flexible installation options is the .Net SDK. I do a lot of .Net development, so after the missing SDK in the V0 release of Crystal Reports Server 2008, and the knowledge that there was no .Net version of the new InfoView, I was concerned. There is a 32 bit version too, as a separate install.</p>
<h3>Even more good news &#8211; SQL Server as default system database</h3>
<p><a href="http://pursuittechnology.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/bi1.png"><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-54" title="MS SQL" src="http://pursuittechnology.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/bi1.png?w=600" alt=""   /></a></p>
<p>I assume this is due to the tiff between SAP and Oracle. Oracle own MySQL, so SAP have dropped MySQL from the installer. Before anyone launches into &#8216;Open source is the answer&#8217;, ask yourself one question &#8211; how many small companies who did their own installation of Crystal Reports Server 2008 have the slightest idea how to backup a MySQL database? Even if they already have MS SQL, chances are they don&#8217;t know how to create a new system database, so they just keep clicking next and end up with a system they never backup.</p>
<p>Thank you SAP (and I don&#8217;t say that very often).</p>
<h3>Other bits and bobs:</h3>
<p>There a various options &#8211; version control and diagnostics. I&#8217;ve not had time to even check the licensing agreements, so won&#8217;t get excited just yet. Version control has been a frustrating omission for too long, so glad to see something appear. Now all I need is proper control of publishing &#8211; reports available from, to etc.</p>
<h3>Central Management Console</h3>
<p>Nothing but good news here so far &#8211; it hasn&#8217;t really changed. After the massive changes of the last release, it&#8217;s good to see that tasks are done in pretty much the same way. There is new stuff, but the old stuff can be done in the same way.</p>
<p>I&#8217;ve not worked through any proper workflow yet, so I don&#8217;t know if I&#8217;ll still be playing &#8216;hunt the option&#8217; between the &#8216;Action&#8217; and &#8216;Manage&#8217; menus, or wondering whether or not rightclick will give me a context sensitive menu or the browser options. Hopefully, that&#8217;s all been fixed.</p>
<h3><del>Infoview</del> BI Launch Pad</h3>
<p>Login screen remains the same, but that&#8217;s about it! After that, first impressions aren&#8217;t great, but can be overridden by the administrator. First time you login, you get 4 mostly empty boxes on the home page &#8211; where are my reports? So you click the tab that says Documents, and get this:</p>
<div id="attachment_51" class="wp-caption alignnone" style="width: 610px"><a href="http://pursuittechnology.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/bi.png"><img class="size-full wp-image-51" title="BI" src="http://pursuittechnology.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/bi.png?w=600&#038;h=332" alt="" width="600" height="332" /></a><p class="wp-caption-text">Where are my reports?</p></div>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p>Nothing in favourites, nothing in inbox, etc, etc. We;re back in the land of Crystal Enterprise 8.0, playing hunt the link. Keep looking, and you&#8217;ll see Folders at the bottom, click that and you&#8217;re back in the familiar territory of your report folders. I know that I can change all these defaults centrally, but for the default to hide all your reports is just silly.</p>
<h3>Overall</h3>
<p>On balance, I feel positive about the new release, hopefully that feeling will continue. When I get time, I&#8217;ll write some more.</p>
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			<media:title type="html">andrewmbaines</media:title>
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			<media:title type="html">SP2</media:title>
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			<media:title type="html">Checks</media:title>
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			<media:title type="html">Installer</media:title>
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			<media:title type="html">BI</media:title>
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		<title>Software Resurrection</title>
		<link>http://pursuittechnology.wordpress.com/2011/04/21/software-resurrection/</link>
		<comments>http://pursuittechnology.wordpress.com/2011/04/21/software-resurrection/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 21 Apr 2011 13:46:53 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>andrewmbaines</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Crystal Report Design]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Crystal Reports for Enterprise]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Crystal Reports SDK]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[business objects]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[crystal reports]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[sdk]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[I&#8217;d originally intended this to be an April Fools entry, but it&#8217;s been a busy month. With a little bit of judicious editing, I&#8217;ll take advantage of Easter and make it a post about resurrection. Along with the rest of the SAP/BO/Crystal world, I&#8217;ve been interested to view the progress of BI 4.0, especially the [...]<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=pursuittechnology.wordpress.com&amp;blog=16714943&amp;post=38&amp;subd=pursuittechnology&amp;ref=&amp;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>I&#8217;d originally intended this to be an April Fools entry, but it&#8217;s been a busy month. With a little bit of judicious editing, I&#8217;ll take advantage of Easter and make it a post about resurrection.</p>
<p>Along with the rest of the SAP/BO/Crystal world, I&#8217;ve been interested to view the progress of BI 4.0, especially the Crystal side of things as that is my main focus. It was while watching the demo of Crystal Reports for Enterprise that I had a strange feeling of deja vu. Summing up the important features of Crystal Reports for Enterprise:</p>
<ul>
<li>It&#8217;s written in Java</li>
<li>It works with rpt files</li>
<li>It&#8217;s not quite as functional as Crystal Reports</li>
<li>It&#8217;ll be hell to deploy with all those annoying java updates</li>
</ul>
<p>Those with memories going back about 12 years will remember Seagate Analysis as part of Crystal/Seagate Info, and its associated product, the freebie Crystal Query (I may have got the name wrong, but it was going to be free forever). The main features of Seagate Analysis were:</p>
<ul>
<li>It was written in Java</li>
<li>It worked with rpt files</li>
<li>It wasn&#8217;t quite as functional as Crystal Reports</li>
<li>It was hell to deploy as back then a 40MB+ download (IIRC) was big, and you still had those annoying java updates</li>
<li>It had a really clever tab that let you reuse your report data in an OLAP-like slicer dicer</li>
</ul>
<p>Well, 4 out of 5 ain&#8217;t bad!</p>
<p>I&#8217;ve no idea if any of the old Seagate Analysis code has been reused, I doubt it, and kind of hope not! However, it does look like an old product has been resurrected.</p>
<p>While typing this, I&#8217;ve been wondering two things:<br />
1) Why did Seagate Analysis fail (if fail is the correct word)<br />
2) What else should be resurrected?</p>
<p>On its failure; Seagate Analysis was only in the product for one release, being dropped with the release of the &#8216;new&#8217; product, Crystal Enterprise. Seemed a strange choice at the time as so much energy had been spent on marketing it and, ignoring the size of download and installation issues, it fitted quite nicely into a web application. A few years later, the dreadful Crystal Reports Explorer appeared, but it was never used much (for very good reasons).<br />
My personal biased opinion is that part of the failure was due to being written in Java. I&#8217;ve always felt you can tell a Java application from the fact that it isn&#8217;t quite as good as the Windows (or Mac) version, bit clunkier, bit slower, less functional.</p>
<p>If my possibly ill-informed, biased opinion (!) is right, could a similar fate await Crystal Reports for Enterprise?</p>
<p>On resurrecting other software, SAP &amp; BO have had their acquisition sprees over the past few years. I&#8217;m sure there&#8217;s plenty of stuff that&#8217;s been quietly ignored. Before you say anything, you can&#8217;t resurrect Desktop Intelligence yet &#8211; the body&#8217;s still warm!<br />
What would you like to see back again? What are your initial thoughts on Crystal Reports for Enterprise&#8217;s likely success?</p>
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			<media:title type="html">andrewmbaines</media:title>
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		<title>New Features &#8211; Past, Present</title>
		<link>http://pursuittechnology.wordpress.com/2011/01/19/features/</link>
		<comments>http://pursuittechnology.wordpress.com/2011/01/19/features/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 19 Jan 2011 12:08:57 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>andrewmbaines</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Crystal Report Design]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[I&#8217;ve seen comments out and about regarding the lack of new features in the next release of Crystal Reports due this year (see this pdf) . As far as I&#8217;m concerned, SAP have deprecated the awkward ActiveX viewer, so I&#8217;m willing to forgive them anything! More seriously, this is mature software, so changes are going [...]<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=pursuittechnology.wordpress.com&amp;blog=16714943&amp;post=30&amp;subd=pursuittechnology&amp;ref=&amp;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>I&#8217;ve seen comments out and about regarding the lack of new features in the next release of Crystal Reports due this year (see this <a href="http://help.sap.com/businessobject/product_guides/CR2011/en/xi4_cr_whatsnew_en.pdf">pdf</a>) . As far as I&#8217;m concerned, SAP have deprecated the awkward ActiveX viewer, so I&#8217;m willing to forgive them anything! More seriously, this is mature software, so changes are going to be gradual, the last truly revolutionary release of Crystal was version 5 when all the conditional formatting, multi-section &amp; sub-reports appeared. I know there have been subsequent changes to the database connectivity that were significant from an engineering perspective, but not important to end users. <em>I need to qualify this paragraph by admitting I like Office 2010, especially the ribbon, so maybe my opinions are odd (I&#8217;m not too impressed with Firefox 4 either).</em></p>
<p>Moving on, this post isn&#8217;t about Crystal 2011 (sorry, <span style="color:#ff6600;"><em>SAP Crystal Reports 2011</em></span>, the marketing police will be calling), it&#8217;s more retrospective. I&#8217;m about to do some work using Crystal Reports 8.5 (sorry, <span style="color:#ff6600;"><em>Seagate Crystal Reports 8.5</em></span>). This got me thinking about all the new stuff that&#8217;s appeared over the years, some new features have seemed trivial but have become must-haves, whereas other features have seemed major, but have never been used. One last mention of Crystal 2011 &#8211; no matter how few new features there are, it will be more than in Crystal 8.5 &#8211; erm &#8211; pdf export and support for Crystal Enterprise, that&#8217;ll be ££££ please.</p>
<p>I can&#8217;t remember when all these things appeared, so I&#8217;ll not bother. If you don&#8217;t remember any of these, then you&#8217;ve probably a lot less grey hair than me! I&#8217;ve excluded some of the exciting stuff (eg Dynamic Parameters) simply because they <strong>did </strong>seem important, <em>and have remained so</em>.</p>
<h3><strong>Things I&#8217;d be upset to lose, but didn&#8217;t seem important at the time:</strong></h3>
<ol>
<li><strong>Resizing the Database Links Window (aka Visual Links)</strong> &#8211; sounds like a daft one to start on, but it used to be a fixed (tiny) size and having to scroll around all the database tables used to drive me nuts! Such a trivial change that made life so much easier.</li>
<li><strong>Duplicating Formulae</strong> &#8211; it&#8217;s common in Crystal to have many very similar formulae running across the page. All that cutting and pasting from one formula to another was made so much simpler when you could just duplicate and rename.</li>
<li><strong>Formula Workshop</strong> &#8211; I really didn&#8217;t see the point of this when it first came out, but it makes finding formulae so much simpler. Add to that, being able to find a formula&#8217;s dependencies is priceless.</li>
<li><strong>Sub-report linking</strong> &#8211; not the ability to, but the user interface. Remember that tiny box with drop-downs that never seemed to link quite as you&#8217;d expect? Then, you&#8217;d try to remove a link and &#8211; oops. The current version is far from perfect (not visual enough), but at least it works.</li>
<li><strong>Saved data selection formula</strong> &#8211; really geeky choice, this is the less glamorous part of being able to edit the parameters in the viewer. Great idea, well executed. I&#8217;ve been working on some reports based on an XML data source where the initial report takes a while to load the data, I wouldn&#8217;t want to repeat the delay every time the user changed a parameter.</li>
<li><strong>Longer formula text</strong> &#8211; once upon a time there was a fairly small limit on how long a formula could be (can&#8217;t remember how long). First report I wrote for a major customer (Computacenter) blew that away so I had to break the formula down into many smaller parts. I then had to cut and paste as the formula was replicated 31 times.</li>
<li><strong>Format Painter</strong> -  Just looking through the old new features documents and can&#8217;t believe this didn&#8217;t arrive until version 10. I know it still doesn&#8217;t quite work as it should on some formatting, but it&#8217;s a great help.</li>
<li><strong>Charts</strong> &#8211; there have been many changes to the charts interface over the years. There used to be the separate chart application where you could do advanced edits, then you&#8217;d add the chart and it would all change ever so slightly! The current interface is nearly right with the exception that some of the changes can only be made in design, not preview, and that resizing the chart messes things up &#8211; maybe next time?</li>
<li><strong>Report Explorer</strong> &#8211; another new feature that I didn&#8217;t use for a while. Then I spent 20 minutes trying to select lines in a crowded section! Just click in the Report Explorer and you have it.</li>
</ol>
<h3><strong>Things that seemed important, but &#8230;.</strong></h3>
<ol>
<li><strong>Maps</strong> &#8211; I loved to demo the maps. Here&#8217;s my report, insert a map just like you do a chart and bingo &#8211; map of USA with sales by state colour coded. As you can probably tell from my spelling, I&#8217;m in the UK, not US. The UK map looked great, but there was no way to sensibly place your data onto the map as the regions made no sense. The only option was to buy another map, but the licensing was so horrendous that nobody did. Moral of story: if you want maps, buy a mapping application.</li>
<li><strong>Workbench</strong> &#8211; The ability to group all your reports into a selection of projects seemed like such a good idea. I spent ages creating a project per customer and adding their reports. Then I fired up my laptop to find there was no simple way to keep the two synchronised. Nor did the workbench add much to windows explorer other than the ability to check some dependencies.</li>
<li><strong>Running Totals</strong> &#8211; It used to take 3 formulae to create a running total &#8211; one to initialise, one to increment and one to display. <em>New </em>Running totals were supposed to make life so much simpler with a simple interface to define what you were adding up and when to calculate it. Then you&#8217;d try and do something complex and have to delete your running total and go back to the 3 formulae solution. For anything beyond trivial, I stick to 3 formulae now.</li>
<li><strong>Basic Syntax</strong> &#8211; There are millions of VB programmers, and millions of Crystal Reports users &#8211; what could be more obvious than letting Crystal use Basic. Except it wasn&#8217;t Basic, it was just different words to those used by Crystal, a bit like describing the Crystal Syntax as Pascal. That meant that neither VB programmers nor Crystal Reports users could use the new syntax. Let&#8217;s get rid of it and let the people writing the documentation work on something else.</li>
<li><strong>Templates</strong> &#8211; there used to a joke about the paper clip in Microsoft Word &#8211; &#8220;You appear to be writing a letter, would you like me to @%@^@ it up for you?&#8221;. This was Crystal&#8217;s answer to the paper clip &#8211; &#8220;You&#8217;ve spent hours placing those fields on your report, would you like me to randomly rearrange them for you&#8221;. With the initial release, it wasn&#8217;t even possible to undo the changes! Maybe it&#8217;s improved since then, I don&#8217;t want to take the risk &#8211; I&#8217;ll stick to modifying an existing report that has the correct formatting.</li>
<li><strong>Autosave Report</strong> &#8211; This seemed to be such a great idea &#8211; you have a program that does (occasionally) fall over so why not save your work as you progress? Except it saved the report over the existing file so if you wanted to just test a few changes, you lost your stable file &#8211; I know you should work on a copy, but welcome to the real world. I much prefer the method used by QlikView where the filename is automatically incremented with a version number.</li>
<li><strong>Sort Control. </strong>I think many people will disagree with this one! When I used to demo Crystal, I was often asked about dynamic parameters &#8211; they were a feature that lots of people wanted. I was never asked about on-report sorting. They look like something that someone who had used WebI would ask for. Newsflash &#8211; WebI and Crystal have different uses. Add to that, the clunky formatting &#8211; they look really nasty.</li>
<li><strong>Highlighting Expert</strong> &#8211; look! I can change the colour of this field based upon it&#8217;s value. However, I also want to change the colour of a second field based upon the value of the first, so now I have to do the same thing in two different ways on the same report.</li>
<li><strong>Xcelsius objects </strong>- I can see the thinking in development &#8211; our chart engine doesn&#8217;t always work as we&#8217;d like, let&#8217;s add one that&#8217;s really difficult to use so that we can tell people they have a choice. I love Xcelsius (I know the name has changed), and think it makes a great dashboard tool, but it&#8217;s too complicated when you add it to Crystal. Add to that the problems of testing all these disjointed bits and it gets worse. Maybe the integration interface will change in the next release, then I can move this up the page to features I don&#8217;t want to lose.</li>
</ol>
<h3>I&#8217;m sure I&#8217;ve missed stuff, or included stuff you disagree with, so comments more than welcome!</h3>
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			<media:title type="html">andrewmbaines</media:title>
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		<title>Smelly Crystal Reports</title>
		<link>http://pursuittechnology.wordpress.com/2010/12/14/smelly-crystal-reports/</link>
		<comments>http://pursuittechnology.wordpress.com/2010/12/14/smelly-crystal-reports/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 14 Dec 2010 10:06:52 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>andrewmbaines</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Crystal Report Design]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Uncategorized]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[business objects]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Code Smells]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[crystal reports]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[One of the few blogs I have bookmarked is Phil Factor&#8217;s Phrenetic Phoughts, in a recent post he discussed SQL Code Smells. As he explains, code smells aren&#8217;t a new idea, they&#8217;re not even necessarily causes of errors, they&#8217;re just things in code that don&#8217;t feel quite right. The sort of thing that may be [...]<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=pursuittechnology.wordpress.com&amp;blog=16714943&amp;post=25&amp;subd=pursuittechnology&amp;ref=&amp;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>One of the few blogs I have bookmarked is <a title="Phil Factor's Phrenetic Phoughts" href="http://www.simple-talk.com/community/blogs/philfactor/default.aspx" target="_blank">Phil Factor&#8217;s Phrenetic Phoughts</a>, in a <a href="http://www.simple-talk.com/community/blogs/philfactor/archive/2010/11/22/95781.aspx" target="_blank">recent post</a> he discussed <em>SQL Code Smells</em>. As he explains, code smells aren&#8217;t a new idea, they&#8217;re not even necessarily causes of errors, they&#8217;re just things in code that don&#8217;t feel quite right. The sort of thing that may be (or may not) be working correctly now, but you just get a feeling it will cause a problem in the future when making changes or something behind the scenes changes.</p>
<p>This got me thinking about smells in Crystal Report design. I do a lot of work with people&#8217;s existing reports, so I see a lot of different styles &#8211; some good, some bad. Being an end user tool, a lot of Crystal Report designers have no formal training. In addition, the iterative nature of report design means that the design of a reports isn&#8217;t normally planned. Even if it is planned, changes are made that don&#8217;t necessarily fit in with the original design. You then have the battle between the designer and the IT focussed DBA who doesn&#8217;t trust the end user to access the database directly so creates views and stored procedures. The end user finds this restrictive so  workarounds are used that make the situation worse.</p>
<p>A few things that make me draw breath:</p>
<p><strong>1. Linked Views</strong></p>
<p>IT have created a view, but something is missing. The report designer has a choice &#8211; wait a week for IT to change the view, or link to another view. They always choose the latter. All of a sudden, instead of a simple query on the customer view, they&#8217;re querying the entire transaction history of every customer to retrieve some obscure fact. They then blame Crystal Reports for bad performance.</p>
<p>Who do you blame? IT need control, the designer has a deadline to meet. You can argue about company culture, or talk about the &#8216;real solution&#8217; being a data warehouse.</p>
<p><strong>2. Complex Conditional Formatting<br />
</strong></p>
<p>Everywhere you go in Crystal now, there is a little formula symbol that allows you to conditionally do something. Be that change the font size, hide a field or change the colour. It&#8217;s great &#8211; most of the time. Where it starts to get smelly is when you have very complex formatting. Just how do you debug it? To make it worse, it&#8217;s then copied and pasted into multiple places. Change management?</p>
<p>Best solution is to use a proper formula that returns a value that is then used in the conditional formatting. That way you can use it in multiple places, and place the formula on the page to see what&#8217;s going wrong. If I get a report with this smell, I copy the formatting into formulae then use the formulae for the formatting. Other problem is that it&#8217;s so fiddly to find where all the conditional stuff is. Which leads me on to&#8230;.</p>
<p><strong>3. Comments</strong></p>
<p>Every article on code smells has this in the list of problems. It may be obvious what a formula is, but will it be so obvious when it&#8217;s been changed 2 or 3 times, then revisited 6 months later? It&#8217;s not uncommon to see Crystal Reports that are over 5 years old. As well as commenting in formulae, I like to add suppressed text fields to the report canvas to explain different sections &#8211; especially where conditional suppression is used.</p>
<p><strong>4. Complex SQL</strong></p>
<p>I mentioned earlier that many Crystal Reports designers have no formal development background. Complex SQL isn&#8217;t their issue &#8211; this one comes from SQL developers who have been landed with Crystal Report design because &#8216;they know SQL and Crystal uses SQL&#8217;. Instead of trusting Crystal to write the SQL, they hand code. However, they&#8217;re really good at this, so like to use sub-queries instead of joins, lots of aliases (renaming table to a, b,c, etc ) you end up with SQL that&#8217;s really hard to interpret. Clever SQL developer then moves to another project and hands the report to the aforementioned end user.</p>
<p><strong>5. Stored Procedure for every report</strong></p>
<p>The SQL developer is the guilty party again! Each report has its own stored procedure that was designed when the report was first requested. This locks in the query and makes change hard work. It also forces a dependency on IT for every change ever made in the future. Users try to modify the report, which takes us back to the first problem.</p>
<p>I have to go to attend a conference call now, but I will return with more smells. In the meantime, I&#8217;d love to hear what others think.</p>
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			<media:title type="html">andrewmbaines</media:title>
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		<title>Letting users add comments to a Crystal Report after it has run</title>
		<link>http://pursuittechnology.wordpress.com/2010/12/01/letting-users-add-comments-to-a-crystal-report-after-it-has-run/</link>
		<comments>http://pursuittechnology.wordpress.com/2010/12/01/letting-users-add-comments-to-a-crystal-report-after-it-has-run/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 01 Dec 2010 09:43:09 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>andrewmbaines</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Crystal Reports SDK]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[business objects]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[crystal reports]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[sdk]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://pursuittechnology.wordpress.com/?p=21</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[I had an interesting question from a new customer last week. They use Crystal Reports to analyse some data, but want users to be able to add comments to the report after it&#8217;s been run. No point adding them before, as the comments were a quote for work that was only known to be required [...]<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=pursuittechnology.wordpress.com&amp;blog=16714943&amp;post=21&amp;subd=pursuittechnology&amp;ref=&amp;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>I had an interesting question from a new customer last week. They use Crystal Reports to analyse some data, but want users to be able to add comments to the report <em>after</em> it&#8217;s been run. No point adding them before, as the comments were a quote for work that was only known to be required after the report had run.</p>
<p>My initial thoughts were to just use the new parameter panel in Crystal 2008, that looks great until you look at the workflow imposed by the user interface. Click here, click there, type a bit, click a bit more, don&#8217;t forget to click the last button or nothing happens &#8211; ugh. Suggest whoever designed that bit looks up &#8216;<a title="Cognitive Walkthrough" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_walkthrough" target="_blank">cognitive walkthrough</a>&#8216;.</p>
<p>Instead, I went back to some code I wrote a couple of years ago. It&#8217;s a simple viewer application that just allow you to view and refresh reports. Simple addition of a button on the toolbar and a panel at the bottom. Click the button, panel appears, comments added, click OK &#8211; Bingo. The comments appear in the pre-defined section of the report. Hardest part was persuading the viewer to refresh its contents without refreshing all the data, otherwise the comment wouldn&#8217;t appear. Turned out to be two lines of code, you just have to find the right two lines!</p>
<p>Oh, forgot to mention, had to be in Korean too.</p>
<p>This customer only wanted the comment to be used for printing one time. What would be really interesting would be to have a continuing comment section that users could add to over multiple runs. Even more interesting would be to use the Enterprise SDK to allow users to add comments to instances after the report has been scheduled. I&#8217;d need to use a custom viewer to open the report using the Report Application Server (RAS) rather than the pageserver as the RAS SDK is much richer. Easy enough to change the report while it&#8217;s being viewed, slightly harder to save it back. Only part I&#8217;m not sure about is whether or not RAS would detect that the report had changed so needed to clear its cache. Turning off the caching isn&#8217;t too sensible due to performance. Restarting RAS every time isn&#8217;t too clever either! I need to dig around in the SDK to find if anything is in there &#8211; one for the Christmas break methinks.</p>
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			<media:title type="html">andrewmbaines</media:title>
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		<title>Nice piece of Business Objects Enterprise SDK work</title>
		<link>http://pursuittechnology.wordpress.com/2010/11/23/nice-piece-of-business-objects-enterprise-sdk-work/</link>
		<comments>http://pursuittechnology.wordpress.com/2010/11/23/nice-piece-of-business-objects-enterprise-sdk-work/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 23 Nov 2010 10:07:17 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>andrewmbaines</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Software]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[business objects]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[crystal reports]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[infoview]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[sdk]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[I was on a customer site a few weeks back. They had management problems with Business Objects Enterprise XI 3.1: They don&#8217;t really know how many reports they have. As this is something discussed at annual review time, would be a great help to know. They know they have far too many report instances, but [...]<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=pursuittechnology.wordpress.com&amp;blog=16714943&amp;post=15&amp;subd=pursuittechnology&amp;ref=&amp;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>I was on a customer site a few weeks back. They had management problems with Business Objects Enterprise XI 3.1:</p>
<ol>
<li>They don&#8217;t really know how many reports they have. As this is something discussed at annual review time, would be a great help to know.</li>
<li>They know they have far too many report instances, but not sure which reports are a problem. As they have many folders and umpteen reports, browsing all the report folders isn&#8217;t an option. Just adding global limits isn&#8217;t an option &#8211; some of these reports need to be kept for many years.</li>
<li>When they change their main application&#8217;s database, they&#8217;re never sure which reports will be affected.</li>
</ol>
<p>Fortunately, I wrote something to do most of this about 3 years ago. It didn&#8217;t do the instance count, or record the folder path,  but all the rest was supported. Plus a bit more as a bonus. Adding the extra bits took a couple of hours.</p>
<p>End result: Web application that reads the Business Objects Enterprise server, storing the results in a SQL Server database.</p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p>Current information held:</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>Report</strong>: folder path, current instance count, subreports, author, comments, subject, title</li>
<li><strong>Database Connection:</strong> Database name, server name, userid, whether or not integrated security used</li>
<li><strong>Database Table:</strong>Table name, alias</li>
<li><strong>Database Column:</strong> Column name and name as used by Crystal. Sadly, this doesn&#8217;t tell you whether or not a column is used, just that it&#8217;s available &#8211; that functionality was mysteriously removed in Crystal 7.</li>
<li><strong>Table Links:</strong> The links between the tables, source table/column, destination table/column &amp; type of join</li>
</ul>
<p>I&#8217;ll be adding extra functionality as customers request. I&#8217;ll certainly be adding Last modification date and last successful instance in the next iteration. Not sure if report owner is needed, up to my customers!</p>
<p>If you&#8217;d like more information about this or Pursuit Technology, please pay a visit to our <a title="web site" href="http://www.pursuittechnology.co.uk">website</a>.</p>
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