What Is the Crystal Repository?

The Crystal Repository is a database of commonly used components that report developers can share between Crystal Reports. These components include:

• Text objects: Reusable text, such as company addresses or confidentiality text.
• Images: Bitmaps, metafiles, Tiff, JPEG, and PNG image formats.
• Custom functions: Business logic that could be reused by passing in new fields as variables.
• SQL Commands: Encapsulated SQL Commands that enable you to write free-form SQL for data access, including parameters. The results are seen as a table by Crystal Reports.
• Business Views: New functionality that allows for the complexity of the datasource(s) to be abstracted, allowing for more productive report development. This is explained in more detail further in the chapter.

This repository was separated in the Crystal Decisions version 9 product suite into a repository for Crystal Reports 9 and an Enterprise object repository attached to the Automated Process Scheduler or APS. In Crystal Enterprise version 10 these two repositories are merged and are simply known as the Crystal Repository, which is attached to the CMS.

For more information on the Crystal Enterprise architecture, p. 506

The Crystal Repository not only stores all the information regarding Crystal Enterprise, such as users, folders, events, and user group information, but now includes the Crystal Report components listed previously. For performance reasons, the report objects themselves are not stored in the Crystal Repository but rather in the File Repository.