Whats New in Crystal Reports 9?

Introduction
Mastering Crystal Reports 9
by Cate McCoy and Gord Maric
Sybex 2003

What’s New in Crystal Reports 9?

The focus of this version of Crystal Reports is on making the product easier to use, faster to both create and view reports, and extending its web functionality. Three simple words describe the changes: power, productivity, and usability. You’ll find the following general changes to the product:

User Interface Changes Crystal Reports has been a huge fan of wizards in the past, and the product continues this focus in the current release. Many of the wizards have been streamlined for usability and to clarify the purpose of the individual wizard.

Performance Enhancements The core report engine has been rewritten from the ground up, providing positive performance results. Because the core engine has changed, reports created with Crystal Reports 9 cannot be opened with earlier releases of the product. Crystal Reports 9 can be used to open reports written in prior versions, and once saved, they are converted to the Crystal Reports 9 storage format.

There are also several specific changes:

Repository Explorer The Repository Explorer is an anchored window in the Crystal Reports development environment that provides access to design elements that can be shared across reports. You can develop an element once—for instance, a formula or graphic—and use it in multiple reports. Changes in the repository will be reflected in the reports that use the elements.

Report Explorer Also an anchored window in Crystal Reports, the Report Explorer provides easy navigation and drill-down access to the logical areas in a report. For example, a new report automatically has five logical areas: Report Header, Page Header, Details, Report Footer, and Page Footer. These five logical areas are directly accessible in the Report Explorer.

Field Explorer The Field Explorer has evolved into an anchored window that is used to add database fields, formula fields, parameter fields, running totals fields, group name fields, and special fields to a report.

Templates Templates provide the ability to create reports that contain design elements but do not contain data. A template can specify fonts, background colors, logos, graphs, and more that can be stored as a standard format and applied to any report.

SQL Commands The SQL-savvy report creator can now directly use SQL commands as a data source. Any valid SELECT statement appropriate to the database being used can be typed into Crystal Reports and used to generate a data result set. This powerful feature expands Crystal Reports into areas that were impossible in the prior version—namely, unions; joins to the same table; having, order by, and group by clauses. This is a significant performance enhancement because SQL is executed on the database server, taking full advantage of that performance environment and freeing Crystal Reports for its main role: formatting, summarizing, and presenting information.

Text Objects Text objects can now be identified with a name, making them reusable components in a report or within the repository.

Report Parts A subset of fields and formulas within a report can be associated with a name and used to export smaller, specific parts of the report as opposed to the entire report. Report parts have great utility for delivering data to smaller devices such as hand-held PDAs and cell phones, which are designed for smaller amounts of data.

Formula Workshop The formula-development environment in Crystal Reports 9 has been enhanced into the Formula Workshop, which contains both the older Formula Editor and a newer Formula Expert. The Formula Expert is a drop-down interface that provides guidance to building formulas and adding them to the repository.

Visual Reporting Elements Cross-tabs now allow multiple values to be displayed side-by-side in a cell. Gantt charts and gauge charts have been added to the built-in set of charting components.

Smart Linking Smart Linking in prior releases of Crystal Reports focused on matching field names to create a join on tables. In Crystal Reports 9, Smart Linking now takes advantage of linking driven by primary keys and foreign keys defined in the data source.

Data Sources Crystal Decisions has expanded the list of natively supported data formats in this release of Crystal Reports. The list includes:

Access/Excel (DAO)	Field definitions	ODBC (RDO)
ACT! 3	File system data	OLAP
ADO.Net	IBM DB2	OLE DB (ADO)
Borland Database Engine	Informix	Oracle
Btrieve	Java data	Outlook
CDO	Lotus Notes Domino	Public Folder ACL
COM data	Mailbox Admin	Public Folder Admin
Crystal queries	Message tracking log	Public Folder Replica
Database files	Microsoft IIS/Proxy log files	Sybase
Dictionary/Infoview	NT archived event log	Web/IIS log files
Exchange folders and Address Book	NT current event log	xBase

Visual Studio .NET Object Libraries Microsoft has shifted their software development focus from the Component Object Model (COM)–based development with Visual Basic, and C++ to Visual Studio .NET. In keeping pace with the industry, Crystal Decisions has developed an object model hierarchy for .NET so that Crystal Reports can be embedded directly in this new environment. The business relationship between Microsoft and Crystal Decisions is a close partnership, with Crystal Reports being the only third-party tool included in the Visual Studio suite of products. COM-based development with Visual Basic 6 and any tool that supports COM continues to be supported and enhanced. We will look at both in the application development sections of this book.

Java Object Libraries Java development for Crystal Decisions is the second big change in programming approach. RAS and the Crystal Enterprise servers can not only run in a Windows environment but can also run in a Unix environment and provide JAVA Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) for application development. Using the Java API, you can open or create existing Crystal reports and publish them on the web.

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