The SAP Idea Place has been in existence for the last two or three years. Looking at the descriptions on the initial page I am not sure if it is obvious what this "thing" is all about:
I will be the first to admit I'm not the sharpest tack in the drawer, but reading the above really does not tell me how powerful SAP Idea Place is, or could be. I found a better one line description searching SCN for "SAP Idea Place":
Start sharing your ideas, discuss and vote for others' ideas today.
Hmm, OK, so what. We can share our ideas and vote for them. Cool. Now what? Well, this is where the power of SAP Idea Place comes into play;
Program Managers of an SAP product look at the ideas (perhaps a better term would be Enhancements). The more an idea has been voted on, the more likely it that it will be implemented. Now, looking at the ideas for this year, leaves me a little nonplused, perplexed and unimpressed. If the idea is voted up two or three times, it more than likely will not be implemented. So it is up to all of us to spread the idea around. I do it on the SCN Discussions (forums) and in my tweets (SAPCRNETSup, SAPCRDes). In this blog, I want to highlight ideas submitted in 2013 for SAP Crystal Reports and SAP Crystal Reports, developer version for Microsoft Visual Studio. I also invite you to vote on these ideas, or create your own. Spread the news, help make SAP Crystal Reports a better product. A product in your image - well in a tiny part anyhow 
.
Here is the list of ideas posted in 2013 and their stats:
| Idea Title | Date Submitted | Votes | Views |
|---|---|---|---|
| Add crdb_FileSystem.dll to Crystal Reports for Visual Studio x64 bit | May 9, 2013 | 3 | 2 |
| SAP Crystal Report 2008 Dynamic Zoom Factor | April 29, 2013 | 2 | 5 |
| Where do I find Crystal Reports Service Packs and Fix Packs if I don't have a support contract | April 25, 2013 | 6 | 15 |
| Allow physical location of subreports to be updated in master report | April 3, 2013 | 8 | 63 |
| Request for ShowProgressAnimation box in CR v13 to display Summary record count similar to CR v11 | March 26, 2013 | 2 | 17 |
| Request for "SearchExpert" Button in .Net Crystal Report Viewer [13.0.5] | March 21, 2013 | 2 | 13 |
| SAP Crystal Reports 2008/2011 missing functionality like using .xlxs data from Access/Excel/(DAO) | January 29, 2013 | 4 | 54 |
| Ability to put OLEs in Crosstab | January 14, 2013 | 2 | 21 |
| Query LDAP via Crystal Report Designer | January 4, 2013 | 5 | 66 |
| Add the Export Format Option "Column Width based on Objects in the Report" in the CRVS2010 for .Net | December 19, 2012 | 4 | 81 |
Personally, looking at the above numbers, I have to wonder how much need there is for most of the ideas. Thus, once again, I invite all of you interested in making Crystal Reports a better product to use your mouse and as the politicians would say; exercise your right to vote. Exercise your right to improve the product you are working with.
And in case you are wondering about the last idea being from 2012 - well, maybe I wanted to have nice round number of ideas (10), or maybe I like that idea ...
Doing a fair amount of work in a few SCN Discussion Spaces (SAP Crystal Reports, version for Visual Studio, SAP Crystal Reports, and a few others), one of my most frequent requests of those posting to Discussions / Forums is to do a bit of searching before posting a question. Doing a bit of thinking on why this appears to be as common as it is, I came to the realization that perhaps one reason is that the SCN search is quite different from the ubiquitous Google search. In this blog, I will document how I approach searching on SCN.
So, starting at the top - as it turns out top right hand corner - use the search box:
Now, KIS & S your search terms; Keep It Short & Sweet. For example for a date selection formula issue with SAP Crystal Reports, it is better to use a string like ‘Crystal selection date’, than ‘date selection formula does not work for Tuesdays and Wednesdays’. Once you enter a search term, say ‘crystal formats export’ the following page will be displayed:
Notice that on the left side of the page, you have a description of what type of knowledge documents were retuned (Asset Type) by the search and how many of each type of documents were found. Also, following the structure of the new SCN, you will find a list of SCN Spaces that may apply to your search term:
Looking for a Support Note (Also known as KBase or KBA or Knowledge Base Article), there are 356 KBAs to look at. As I am interested in Crystal Reports and Visual Studio .NET, click on the Support Notes link. I can than select a component, in this case BI-DEV-NET:
This filters me down to 49 results – About two and a half pages. Adding an extra search term; ‘PDF’, filters down to a manageable 20 results.
Often on the SCN Discussion Space (forum) someone may simply recommend a KBA number. See that you can also search for a specific KBA number.
If you want to go back to your original search result set, click on “Clear All Filters”:
Some resources may be translated and if interested, you can search for a specific language translation:
By clicking on the ’more’ link at the bottom , right side of the page, you will get additional filters that include; Region, Industry, Solution Suite, Contributor and Author:
You can also use date as a possible selection criteria.Sorting of results can be done on Relevance, Date and Rating:
For more details on searching the SCN - where we are / where we are going, see New and upcoming SCN search Enhancements as well as the blog How to use SCN search. And that is it. Following the above steps should eliminate or at least minimize waiting for a response to your query. I suspect there is nothing more irritating than a link to a KBA, a bog, wiki or what ever that comes up using the SCN search engine.
For more information see:
Everything I know about... Searching SCN
The very important and frequently used features in the Crystal Designer are the ReportOptions.
Consider a scenario where you would need to access / modify the values of Report Options of a Crystal report at runtime in a Crystal Reports .NET application.
In this case we would need to use the Inproc RAS APIs of Crystal Reports.
‘Report Options’ could be found at below places in the Crystal Designer.
Crystal Reports 2008 – “FILE --> Report Options”
Crystal Reports for Visual Studio 2010 – “Crystal Reports --> Report --> Report Options. “
Not all but few of these values are accessible using InProc RAS .NET APIs.
Here is how…
Take a look at the “ ReportOptions Class provided by CrystalDecisions.ReportAppServer.ReportDefModel Namespace” in the API reference Guide for InProc RAS .NET SDK.
Crystal Reports 2008 InProc RAS .NET SDK API reference guide.
Crystal Reports for Visual Studio 2010 InProc RAS .NET SDK API reference guide
Here is the sample code to demonstrate the use of these APIs.
CrystalDecisions.CrystalReports.Engine.ReportDocument rd = new CrystalDecisions.CrystalReports.Engine.ReportDocument();
ISCDReportClientDocument rcd = new ReportClientDocumentClass();
rd.Load(Server.MapPath("ReportOptionsSampleReport.rpt"));
rcd = rd.ReportClientDocument;
CrystalDecisions.ReportAppServer.ReportDefModel.ReportOptions OReportOptions = rcd.ReportOptions;
OReportOptions.CanSelectDistinctRecords = true;
OReportOptions.ConvertNullFieldToDefault = true;
OReportOptions.ConvertOtherNullsToDefault = true;
OReportOptions.EnableAsyncQuery = false;
OReportOptions.EnablePushDownGroupBy = true;
OReportOptions.EnableSaveDataWithReport = true;
OReportOptions.EnableSelectDistinctRecords = true;
OReportOptions.ErrorOnMaxNumOfRecords = true;
OReportOptions.RefreshCEProperties = true;
rcd.SaveAs("NewCrystalReport.rpt", @"C:\");
These APIs could be really usefull specially while plaiyng with the report object on the fly and edit / modify the report options of the target rpt file.
This article gives an idea as how to use Crystal report in .Net Windows Application with parametrized queries andOracle as Database using dataset.I had searched on internet for articles related to Crystal Report with parametrized query with Oracle,but I was unable to find any good article on this topic.So I am posting my article on this topic.
There are three main points in this article.
1. Crystal Report with parametrized query.
2. Using Oracle Views because here stored procedure will not be able to do this job because of the fact that OracleStored Procedure does not return Multiple Rows(Record Set) as Sql Server Stored Procedures do.
3. Using DataSet.
Hence I have used Oracle views in this project to bind the Crystal Report and Dataset.Then I wrote my parametrized query on the view as we do generally on database tables. So this Project will give a good idea on how to Use CrystalReport with Oracle. There are many methods to do this job, even we can create Oracle packeges which will return mutiple records as SQl Server Stored Procedures. But I found this way simple and fast to do.
Note: No special background knowledge is needed for this article. Any beginner or Intermediate will be able to understand this code.It will be good if you have a basic knowledge of database views
You can also follow this link for the same:
http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/28330/Using-Crystal-Report-with-Oracle-and-parametrized
Hope you will found this blog useful .
- Bwuser
Sometimes we just want to know the database that is being used by Crystal Reports and its properties. It’s tedious to go back to designer and check every report in it. How would it be if we do that using .NET SDK?
We are familiar with the ReporDocument Object Model, but to achieve this we have to leverage the ReportClientDocument Object Model. These two models can be used interchangeably to manipulate a report.
If we are to find the properties from the designer then:
As far as this task is concerned we have to use to inProc RAS where inProc stands for In-Process and it means that the deployment package for the RAS .NET application requires only the .NET assemblies. Does definition look complicated? Here is the simpler version. inProc RAS has the ability to create/ manipulate the report definition/template without requiring any enterprise products like BOE, Crystal Server etc….
The references that you would require for creating the .NET project are following:
Following code can help you achieve the objective:
| Sample Code |
|---|
ReportDocument rd = new ReportDocument(); rd.Load(Server.MapPath("CrystalReports.rpt")); ISCDReportClientDocument rcd = rd.ReportClientDocument; DatabaseController databaseController = rcd.DatabaseController; CrystalDecisions.ReportAppServer.DataDefModel.ConnectionInfo connectionInfo = databaseController.FindConnectionInfoByDBServerName("DatabaseName"); PropertyBag oldPb = connectionInfo.Attributes; foreach (String attribute in oldPb.PropertyIDs) { if (oldPb[attribute].ToString().Equals("System.__ComObject")) { Response.Write(attribute + " (" + oldPb[attribute].GetType().ToString() + ") = "); PropertyBag oldLogonPb = (PropertyBag)oldPb[attribute]; foreach (String logonAttribute in oldLogonPb.PropertyIDs) { Response.Write(logonAttribute + " = " + oldLogonPb[logonAttribute].ToString() + " (" + oldLogonPb[logonAttribute].GetType().ToString() + ")"); } } else { Response.Write(attribute + " = " + oldPb[attribute].ToString() + " (" + oldPb[attribute].GetType().ToString() + ")"); } } CrystalDecisions.ReportAppServer.DataDefModel.Tables tables = databaseController.Database.Tables; CrystalDecisions.ReportAppServer.DataDefModel.Table customerTable = (CrystalDecisions.ReportAppServer.DataDefModel.Table)tables.FindTableByAlias("Sales_by_Category"); Response.Write("Owner" + " = " + customerTable.QualifiedName + " "); |
This code works for Crystal Reports 2008 (12.x) and Crystal Reports for Visual Studio 2010 (13.x) without any problem.
While designing the report we drop the required objects within the canvas/ layout of the report. Have we ever tried thought what is the proper name of it? How that can be found using .NET SDK?
Not many people who design the reports actually know that Crystal Reports has 5 prominent Areas - Report Header, Page Header, Details, Report Footer, and Page Footer. Group Header and Group Footer are added later only if group, summary, or subtotal is added to the report, which takes the count to 7.
When a group, summary, or subtotal is added, the Group Header area appears directly above the Details area and the Group Footer area appears directly below the Details area. (See the Output below)
The following is the code that has helped me find Areas in a Report, which has a sub-report, summary, subtotal and group etc…
| Sample Code to Find Areas |
|---|
private void FindAreas() { ReportDocument rd = new ReportDocument(); string reportPath = Server.MapPath("CrystalReports.rpt"); rd.Load(reportPath); ReportDefinition reportDefinition = rd.ReportDefinition; Areas areas = reportDefinition.Areas;
if (areas.Count > 0) {
Response.Write("</br>"); Response.Write("</br>"); Response.Write("<table border=1 cellspacing=2>"); Response.Write("<tr>"); Response.Write("<td><b>Area Format</b></td>"); Response.Write("<td><b>Area Kind</b></td>"); Response.Write("<td><b>Area Name</b></td>"); Response.Write("<td><b>Section Name</b></td>"); Response.Write("</tr>");
foreach (Area area in areas) { Response.Write("<tr>"); Response.Write("<td>" + area.AreaFormat.ToString() + " </td>"); Response.Write("<td>" + area.Kind.ToString() + " </td>"); Response.Write("<td>" + area.Name + " </td>"); Response.Write("<td>" + area.Sections.ToString() + " </td>"); Response.Write("</tr>"); }
Response.Write("</table>"); }
} |
The output of the code is as follows:
My quest was to find the Areas using Crystal Reports .NET and the code has helped me achieve the same.