Report-to-Report Linking


No matter how well designed, no single report can be expected to address all the needs of a business. Even if it could be done, the report would be unhelpful to the usersoverwhelming and hard to read. One way of making the information easy to manage is to break it out over several reports but make navigation easy by placing hyperlinks in the report to allow the user to move smoothly from report to report.

In the Chap9_4 report, you'll add a hyperlink that opens a report from BusinessObjects Enterprise. More about Enterprise will be explained in Part V, "Web Report DistributionUsing BusinessObjects Enterprise and Crystal Reports Server," but for now just follow along.

1.

From the menu choose File, Open. In the bottom left of the Open dialog window there is a button labeled Enterprise. Click the button and, if you aren't already connected to Enterprise, you will be prompted to log on. If you don't know the appropriate information to log on, move to the next section.

2.

Browse to the Report Samples folder, then the General Business folder, and finally to the World Sales Report and click open.

3.

With the World Sales Report open, right-click on the chart and choose copy. Using the report tabs displayed right below the toolbars, go back to the Chap9_4 report.

4.

Right-click on the Customer Contact Listing text, choose format text, and click the hyperlink tab.

5.

Select Another Report Object and click the Paste button. You will see much of the window get populated. If the Paste button is not enabled, go back to your World Sales Report, select the chart, right-click the chart, choose copy, and try again. By copying the chart, you're actually trapping significant information about the chart that the designer interprets for you.

Figure 9.10. Creating a hyperlink to another report.


6.

Click OK. From the View menu, choose HTML Preview. When the preview has opened, mouse over the Customer Contact Listing text box and notice that the mouse cursor changes, indicating a hyperlink. Clicking the hyperlink will open the World Sales Report.

7.

This powerful feature allows users to flow from one report to another with the potential to drill down from a high level to very low level of detail or to a completely different subject matter altogether.




Crystal Reports XI(c) Official Guide
Crystal Reports XI Official Guide
ISBN: 0672329174
EAN: 2147483647
Year: N/A
Pages: 365

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