Crystal Reports Web Alternatives Compared

Each of the Crystal Reports web approaches listed in the preceding section has advantages and disadvantages, depending on whether out-of-the-box user interfaces are sufficient, your level of web-development expertise, corporate development standards, the sophistication of your reports, how fluid the data you want to present is, the number of users you want to serve, and your budget. It s helpful to examine your reporting requirements, expertise level, and hardware and software environment before you decide on a particular web reporting direction. Choosing one method won t necessarily preclude you from switching later. For example, it s perfectly acceptable to design a simple report that you initially just export to HTML, and then later decide to give web viewers real-time access to it via the RDC or various Crystal Enterprise editions. However, if you design a very interactive report with drill-down capabilities, you won t achieve the desired level of interactivity with a simple HTML export ” you ll need to use the RDC, the Java Reporting Component, or a Crystal Enterprise edition.

If you just want to occasionally allow a simple, non-interactive report to be viewed in a web browser, you may consider simply exporting to HTML right from Crystal Reports (discussed later in this chapter). This simple approach won t allow interactivity with your report (drill-down, on-demand subreports, or use of the group tree) and won t show data in real time. But, a simple detail or summary report that can be viewed in a few pages can easily be opened directly in a web browser. A viewer simply uses an open command from the browser s File pull-down menu to view the HTML file directly from a local or network drive without a web server, or they can click a link or enter the correct URL to view the exported file from a web server.

If you want to provide more interactivity, or your report viewers need access to live real-time reporting, you need to choose between the remaining methods (RDC, VS.NET, Java Reporting Component, or Crystal Enterprise Embedded Edition). Crystal Enterprise Embedded Edition provides an out-of-the-box user interface that requires no custom coding. Also, you can achieve an even higher level of report control and customization by using programming interfaces with these methods . Because the object models exposed by these options are very robust, you can control almost every aspect of the report at run time, including section formatting, setting formulas, and changing fonts, colors, and other formatting from within your code. Then you have the Crystal Enterprise 10 Express, Professional, and Premium editions. These options take web reporting to yet another level with multitier, multiserver capabilities and automated scheduling and maintenance. While there s a benefit to having more choices than ever, there s potentially a higher level of confusion as well. The question that may very well arise: Which of these methods should I use?

If you already have an existing RDC-based web application in place with a Microsoft web server, you may simply wish to continue to use it with the new version of the RDC and updated version 10 reports. While Business Objects recommends that you update these applications to CE Embedded Edition, you will need to undertake an additional learning curve to convert your RDC ASPs to CE ”they don t run under CE Embedded as-is.

If you are developing new applications or want to take advantage of CE Embedded Edition features (such as moving the report processing server to another computer separate from your web server, or developing interactive design reports on the fly applications), you ll probably lean toward a Crystal Reports Developer or Advanced Developer with CE Embedded solution. Understand, however, that the Crystal Enterprise Embedded Edition included with Crystal Reports is an entry-level version that doesn t provide the scalability or expansion capability of the full versions of Crystal Enterprise. Your development efforts won t be lost, though, as you can migrate your CE Embedded applications to higher levels of Crystal Enterprise 10 should the need arise.

Caution

Edition Confusion seems to be an ever-increasing circumstance of purchasing Crystal Reports and Crystal Enterprise. With each new release, Business Objects adds editions and Crystal Reports/Crystal Enterprise bundles that make choosing the best option for your web reporting needs a more complicated process. Read through various chapters of this book and make sure you understand your web reporting options before making a final software or bundle purchase.

The CE Embedded option in Crystal Reports 10 Developer and Advanced Developer Edition offers the ability to go beyond the single- tier limitations of the RDC/Active Server Page methodology. By having the option of separating the web server from the computer that actually processes reports, you gain the ability to support larger and more complex reports without degrading the performance of your web server (which, in general, is designed to serve up web pages, not to process large database queries). Crystal Enterprise Express, Professional, and Premium go even further, by allowing more granular separation of the various report processing and viewing steps (Crystal Enterprise Professional and Premium can take this separation of components to a possibly absurd level). Different computers on the network can be tasked with formatting reports, running database queries, managing report caches to send already-generated report pages to the web browser, and so forth.

If this sharing of the reporting load methodology isn t enough benefit, Crystal Enterprise Professional and Premium also allow automatic scheduling, e-mailing , or file transfer of reports (CE Express also provides some, but not all, of these advanced distribution features). These features allow you to schedule reports to run either on a one-time basis or on some recurring basis, such as once a day, once a week, and so on. The result can be viewed in a web browser, exported to an alternate file format (such as Acrobat. PDF, Excel, or Word), and attached to an e-mail message or sent to an alternate location via File Transfer Protocol. When viewers launch Crystal Enterprise in their browsers, they can look at a report s history and view any of the previously scheduled reports without requiring a database query to be run.

And finally, Crystal Enterprise includes its own Software Development Kit that can be used with various development environments to allow complete customization of the Crystal Enterprise user interface, access to Enterprise s scheduling capabilities, and control of report customization at run time. And, you can even add more Crystal Enterprise functionality by implementing report design or modification on the fly with Crystal Enterprise implementations .

If you have an existing RDC-based web reporting environment that suits you well and is not overburdened by excessive use, you may want to consider continuing to use this solution ( especially if any additional features of Crystal Enterprise won t be justified by the time, effort, and expense required to convert). If you have established Visual Studio .NET as your new corporate standard, you ll obviously want to look at the additional features that Crystal Reports 10 Developer and Advanced Developer Editions provide, as well as exploring use of the Crystal Enterprise Embedded SDK from within VS.NET. But, if you want to automate report scheduling, support a larger number of users on an Enterprise basis, or automatically export reports to different file formats and deliver via e-mail or FTP, you ll want to explore the fuller versions of Crystal Enterprise.

Note	Complete information on Crystal Enterprise 10 Professional Edition, including detailed information on Crystal Enterprise usage and implementation, can be found in Chapters 24, 25, and 26.