.NET development against BI 4.0 - Primer? Roadmap?

[former_member1096194]

I've been spinning in circles with my Crystal project, and I'd like to return to basics with some really fundamental questions.

I've been tasked with an upgrade/rewrite of an old ASP.NET 2.0/3.5 web application.  This application presents the user with a (sometimes limited) folder tree of available reports, including their Favorites folder, and allows them to run/schedule any report, prompting for parameters if necessary.  Non-scheduled reports are displayed directly by the application using Crystal Reports URL Reporting (viewrpt.cwr) technology.  I don't know version numbers / system versions of the previous crystal servers.

The crystal server itself has been successfully upgraded to BI Platform 4.0, currently with feature pack 7, and is running fine.  The new application has to be written against the ASP.NET 4.0 framework.  All of our in-house code is in C#.

I'm having some difficulty traversing the .NET SDK section of this site, possibly because I'm getting confused by the various flavors, object models, methodologies and technologies surrounding the serving of Crystal reports.  I find myself with several questions:

- Given BI Platform 4.0 and an ASP.NET web application interface, what's my best bet for development going forward, in terms of object model?  Viewing technology?

- Is there a good roadmap/primer document anyone can recommend for such a path?  I'm looking for anything: documents here or eslewhere, books, whatever.

- Is there any general overview various technologies involved in developing .NET applications designed to serve reports from BI Platform 4?

Thanks in advance.

John

[former_member183750 · Accepted solution]

Hi John

Start here:

Sample apps are here:

Dell Sttinnet has some excellent resources:

http://www.dellstinnett.com/sample_code.html

And I occasionally visit this site also:

http://book.soundonair.ru/sams/

Open Doc info:

http://help.sap.com/businessobject/product_guides/boexir4/en/xi4_opendocument_en.pdf

There is also the new RESTful Services SDK, though at this time for Crystal Reports it still has a ways to go. Not too bad for Admin and WEBI.

- Ludek

Senior Support Engineer AGS Product Support, Global Support Center Canada

Follow us on Twitter

[DellSC · Accepted solution]

In addition to the links that Ludek posted, you need to be aware that the .NET SDK is basically a wrapper for COM objects.  This means you need to do a couple of things:

- If you're using .NET Framework 4.0 or newer, there will be a new property on the References for the SDK assemblies called "Embed Interop Types".  You need to set this to False in order to use the SDK.

- .NET does not memory manage COM objects well.  So, you need to do one of two things when using objects from the SDK - either enclose them in a "Using" clause, or be sure to explicitly .Dispose() them when you're done with them.

-Dell