Appendix C: Crystal Reports and Java

Appendix C - Crystal Reports and Java
Mastering Crystal Reports 9
by Cate McCoy and Gord Maric
Sybex 2003

Overview

Crystal Reports has always been known as a Microsoft tool. Actually, some people are surprised to find out that Crystal Reports is not a Microsoft product at all but from an independent company. The mistaken impression that Crystal Reports is a Microsoft tool is not surprising because Crystal Reports has been bundled with Visual Basic for a very long time, and it is the only third-party product to be bundled with Microsoft’s Visual Studio .NET development environment. Crystal Decisions is now moving into the Java world. Crystal Decisions previously had and still has Java web browser viewers for Crystal Reports. They are moving into server-side processing with the Report Application Server (RAS) and Crystal Enterprise. RAS is essentially the entry-level edition of Crystal Enterprise that ships with Crystal Reports 9. RAS and Crystal Enterprise support both a COM platform and a Java platform. See Chapter 23 for more details on Crystal Enterprise or Chapter 24 for more details on RAS.

With the RAS Software Development Kit (SDK) you can create reports via code; open existing reports; add and remove sections, fields, and charts; manipulate report parameters and formulas; and apply design templates. These are the same features we discussed in Chapters 19, 20, and 21, using COM and .NET.

Crystal Reports 9 also includes a JavaBean data source driver, which supports receiving data from a custom-built Java class. With this driver, developers can write their own Java Data Provider.

Warning 

The RAS Server is the entry-level edition of Crystal Enterprise. Crystal Enterprise includes two other editions, Standard and Professional, that provide more features and the ability to grow your report deployment environment to a larger audience. Not all features are supported in the entry-level RAS and Crystal Enterprise Standard environments.

The Crystal Report Writer is still only a Windows product; the RAS Server can open Crystal Reports created in Windows, in this version and previous versions. (See the Introduction for a list of other products available from Crystal Decisions for reporting and report deployment.)

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