Hello everyone.
I have just spent a very challenging few days getting Crystal Reports 2008 Developer (advanced version) working with a mySQL data source. I fell into several pits and narrowly escaped being eaten by monsters. I thought I'd share my experience to spare others the same trouble. All the stuff I'm writing about here applies to the runtime as well as the Developer UI.
I'm working on Windows Server 2008 R2, 64 bit, standard edition. The mySQL server is 5.1.42. The mySQL ODBC connector is version 5.1.6. You need the 32-bit version of this connector, even if you're on a 64-bit machine.
Lessons learned:
1. JDBC connectivity in Crystal Reports doesn't work correctly. It consumes excessive memory when a report requires lots of rows from a data base. Don't even think about using it.
2. Crystal Reports has a problem with ODBC for mySQL in which it sometimes gives a dialog box with these words in it.
The alias requested 'SOME_TABLE_NAME', contains a combination
of characters which is not considered to be valid.
This error message come up when using items on Crystal's "Database" menu like "Set Datasource Location..."
To fix this you need to make a registry change. As far as I know this has to be done for each account on each machine running the Crystal Developer. (insert usual warning about registry editor). Find the key named:
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Business Objects\Suite 12.0\Crystal Reports\Database
Create a new string value named InvalidAliasCharList Give it this value:
.:{}()@&$#^!*~|%\\\"
Notice that the last two characters are backslash double-quote.
Good luck. It actually works pretty well now that it's working.
If any other community member can offer corrections or better ways of coping with this stuff, please do!
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