Publishing to the Web Desktop

Publishing content into Crystal Enterprise refers to taking content in the form of reports or other object types such as spreadsheets and saving them to a specific folder within Crystal Enterprise. The reason it is called publishing content is that once saved, any user with the appropriate authority can then view the content.

There are three ways to publish content into Crystal Enterprise:

• Push method
• Pull method
• Crystal Publishing Wizard

Push Method

The Push method uses the File Save As method available with Crystal Reports and Crystal Analysis Professional. This is illustrated in Figure 23.21.

Figure 23.21. Using File, Save As, the user can select the Enterprise icon. The report is then pushed from the desktop to the Enterprise infrastructure.

As an alternative to selecting a local drive, the user can select the Enterprise icon. Crystal Enterprise then forces the user to log in. A listing of folders becomes available to which the user can publish content. This list is secured by the user's rights so the user can only access and publish content to folders to which she has access. This method then pushes the file from her local workstation and saves it within the Enterprise infrastructure.

NOTE

This is a Windows-only method and users cannot use this if their Crystal Enterprise is hosted on a UNIX platform. Also note that to use this method the publisher needs to have rights to the Windows domain, in which the Crystal Enterprise infrastructure resides.

 

Pull Method

For the Pull method, the user logs on to Crystal Enterprise, specifically the Crystal Management Console and then "pulls" the file from the local system to the Crystal Enterprise Infrastructure.

In the Crystal Management Console, navigate to the Objects section. Click the New Object button and navigate to the report or object you want to publish to Crystal Enterprise.

For Crystal Reports only, a thumbnail can be saved as an image of the first page of the report. To achieve this, save the report with data and choose File, Summary Info options; the Save Preview Picture needs to be checked.

The user browses for the objects and then specifies which folder to publish the object to. Notice the different object types that can be published to Crystal Enterprise as displayed in Figure 23.22.

Figure 23.22. The Crystal Management Console displaying the various object types that can be published to Crystal Enterprise.

Using the method, the user pulls the object into Crystal Enterprise. The user needs to have authority to do this and access to the Crystal Management Console.

Crystal Publishing Wizard

The Crystal Publishing Wizard, shown in Figure 23.23, is a locally installed Windows application that doesn't need to be installed on the Crystal Enterprise server. This publishing method is best suited to publishing a large number of files into the system.

Figure 23.23. The Publishing Wizard walks the user through publishing an object.

The wizard authenticates you first to determine your publishing rights. It then walks you through locating the files you want to publish. You need to specify the Crystal Enterprise folders where you want to publish the files. You can set file properties for each of the files, such as a description or what database logon information should be used as a default when this file is run.

NOTE

In version 10 of this application, the multiple publishing wizards have been consolidated into one. Also, please note the new object types that the wizard enables you to publish.

 

Crystal Import Wizard

Although this tool is primarily used to upgrade a set of objects from one Crystal Enterprise system to another or from an older Crystal Enterprise system to the current version, this tool is sometimes used for publishing content. The wizard walks you through selecting a source and destination Crystal Enterprise environment, as illustrated in Figure 23.24. You then select users and objects to import into the destination system.

Figure 23.24. The Crystal Import Wizard showing the various source versions that the system can import from.

The source versions include

• Seagate Info (Crystal Enterprise's predecessor) 7.5
• Crystal Enterprise 8
• Crystal Enterprise 8.5
• Crystal Enterprise 9
• Crystal Enterprise 10

Objects that you can migrate

• Users and User Groups
• Folders and Favorites Folder for specified users
• Objects and related instances
• Events
• Server groups
• Calendars
• Repository objects

NOTE

Although the wizard is Windows-based, you can still import from Unix-based Crystal Enterprise systems.

Crystal Reports or Crystal Analysis Professional enables a content creator to design reports while not connected to Crystal Enterprise. This flexibility means that the Crystal Enterprise infrastructure does not have to be established before a report developer can start creating content. However, when publishing the report, the connection informationthe information required to connect to the data sourceis published with the report. Crystal Enterprise looks for a data source name when executing the report and if one is not found, the report fails.

The solution is that the connection information can be changed in the Crystal Management Console by selecting the object icon and changing the information on the Database tab to a connection that resides on the server. An alternative is to keep the connection information consistent between the Enterprise infrastructure and the publisher's workstation.

Another alternative is to create and publish reports using the ODBC connection string. This effectively removes the need for a DSN.

Because the page or job service/process is executing the report, these services need to have access to the data source server. For example, if the report is using the native Oracle driver to connect, the page and job server need to have rights such that they can connect to the Oracle Server.