Sharing Report Design Components

Report designers have many tricks up their sleeves to make their report design efforts more productive. In the past, many report designers would maintain basic report templates containing the most reused objects and business logic. In many cases, these reports would contain corporate logos, formatted page headers and footers, text objects with typical text (like the company's address), and even some typical formula logic. We could call them warehouse reports.

Report designers would copy and paste these objects between the warehouse report and the newly created reports on a regular basis. This would save the report designer a significant amount of time by not recreating these objects from scratch. Of course, when logic or other objects change, the warehouse report could be updated so that all newer reports would also benefit. The report designer would have to remember which reports could have been affected, open them up, and update them by hand. This process was cumbersome but necessary.

Imagine the ability to reuse and share the most commonly used components of your best Crystal reports with other developers within your organization. What if components such as SQL statements, images, text objects, and common formulas could all be accessed through one common source, rather than dozens, or even hundreds, of individual Crystal Reports? Such a capability would dramatically increase the overall productivity of a single Crystal Reports developer, let alone a team of Crystal Reports developers.

Wouldn't it be great if there were a warehousing utility that could act upon reports without all the report designer's manual labor? A warehouse or database of objects that could be linked to the reports? A repository! This common source for report components is now available via the Crystal Reports 9 Component Repository. These reusable report objects are stored in a central repository, making the process of change management incredibly easy because a single change to an object (such as an image) can be easily propagated across any number of Crystal Reports.