Chapter 21: Crystal Reports Web Alternatives

Overview

So far, this book has discussed many techniques for creating sophisticated reports with the Crystal Reports 10 designer. Part III of the book discusses methods for integrating those reports into your custom Windows applications with Visual Basic and Visual Studio .NET. However, business organizations, both large and small, continue to turn to web- based technology for both internal corporate intranets and the Internet. Accordingly, providing a way to display your reports in a web browser is crucial.

Crystal Reports 10 continues in this web-based direction by providing various options for placing your reports on the Web, depending on Crystal Reports edition, your particular web environment, and your budget (many options require upgrades or additional licenses). From simple HTML exports to a multitier, multiserver enterprise-wide implementation of Crystal Enterprise Premium, you have many choices to consider when looking toward web distribution and customization of Crystal Reports.

If you re familiar with Crystal Reports 9, you may feel that the core Crystal Reports 10 designer (covered in Part I of this book) has undergone too few changes to deserve a full version number increase. While this is a valid argument, the new version of Crystal Enterprise has gone through major enhancements and is certainly worthy of the full version number increase. These new features, as well as a release schedule that coincided with the Crystal Reports 10 release, lend themselves to a more integrated Crystal Reports/Crystal Enterprise 10 package. There are, as before, various versions of Crystal Enterprise, including Embedded Edition (formerly known as RAS Edition), Crystal Enterprise Express Edition (formerly known as Standard Edition), and Crystal Enterprise Professional and Premium Editions.

Both improved Java and .NET support are included with Crystal Reports 10. Both Crystal Reports and Crystal Enterprise Java interfaces have been improved to support JSP/J2EE-based web reporting deployments. Microsoft s emerging ASP.NET is supported more fully with both Crystal Reports and Enterprise. And, there are still legacy web alternatives as well, including the COM-based Report Designer Component that supports standard web connectivity via Active Server Pages on a Microsoft Internet Information Server.

These different options give you even more choices than before (and, potentially introduce additional levels of confusion) on how to place a Crystal Report on the Web ”either on your internal corporate intranet or on the entire Internet:

• Export static reports to HTML format (covered in this chapter) In this case, you just export your report to one of several different HTML formats, much as you would export a Word or Excel file. Viewers can simply open the HTML file in their browser, or the file can be placed on a web server for viewing.

• Use the Crystal Enterprise Embedded Edition with Microsoft Active Server Pages (covered in Chapter 22) or Java Server Pages This method, formerly known as the Crystal Enterprise RAS Edition, provides a high level of web integration for reports and is the entry point into Crystal Enterprise report integration. The product can be used out of the box or can be customized via ASP or JSP custom coding. This method offers several advantages over older web integration methods, such as the ability to separate the RAS SDK and RAS Server onto two separate machines for more efficient report processing, and the ability to create or modify reports on the fly in web pages and then save the resultant .RPT files on disk. Crystal Enterprise Embedded Edition is included only with Crystal Reports 10 Developer and Advanced Developer Editions.

• Use the Java Reporting Component and Java Viewer SDK (covered in Chapter 23) This reporting engine provides many (but not all) of the capabilities of other Microsoft- oriented reporting engines for web customization. Using Java Server Pages, this approach allows connecting to a report directly, or through an existing Crystal Enterprise installation.

• Use Visual Studio .NET with Web Forms (covered in Chapter 22) Visual Studio .NET (VS.NET) incorporates a special version of Crystal Reports as its included reporting tool. The VS.NET object model exposes Crystal Reports functionality, allowing complete control of reports at run time in a web browser. Crystal Reports 10 Developer and Advanced Developer editions expand on VS.NET functionality by adding additional capabilities and features to the base VS.NET Crystal Report functionality.

• Use the Report Designer Component (RDC) with Microsoft Active Server Pages (covered in Chapter 22) This method, which was the state-of-the-art method prior to Visual Studio .NET and Crystal Enterprise, provides a high level of web integration for reports, virtually identical to the level of flexibility allowed with Visual Basic. This method, however, does not take advantage of the multitier, shared processing capability of Crystal Enterprise editions. Despite Business Objects advice to migrate from the RDC to .NET or Crystal Enterprise editions, converting existing RDC web applications to these new methods may require a fair amount of redesign, so you may still consider using this method. It is covered in this section for those that wish to continue using this legacy method of web integration.

• Using Crystal Enterprise (covered in Chapters 24, 25, and 26) Crystal Enterprise provides a rich, multitier/multiserver method of hosting real-time and automatically scheduled Crystal Reports on the Web. You can use the standard out-of-the-box user interface provided by Crystal Enterprise, or you may completely customize the user interface using HTML and various development technologies, such as Crystal Server Pages, ASP.NET, or JSP.