Using Crystal Reports as Quick Reports

Crystal Reports can be used to develop richly formatted layouts that can be included in and accessed from IFS Applications as Quick Reports. See the overview for more details.

In order to develop Crystal Reports a Crystal Reports license and client installation is required for each developer work station. The current version of Crystal Reports is 2011, even if this is the recommended version at the time of writing this may change in the future as new versions are released. Usually reports developed using older version of Crystal Reports work fine using a newer runtime. To run a report developed using a newer version than the runtime is generally not supported, though. So before acquiring a copy of Crystal Reports, make sure this version works with IFS Applications (i.e. the bundled runtime is updated). Examples used in this section all use Crystal Report 2011.

Contents

 

Developing Crystal Reports using the Crystal Reports Designer

To develop Crystal Reports you need a client installation of Crystal Reports and a license. IFS support the integration to be able to run Crystal Reports within IFS Applications, we do not provide any support when it comes to report development. Refer to the included documentation in Crystal Reports and/or make sure to acquire other types of support from 3rd party vendors/suppliers if needed. This applies to both customers and for IFS internally (i.e. country organizations developing reports for customers of for internal use). Also make sure to review the considerations and design lines section below.
For help on using Crystal Reports refer to your Crystal Reports User's Guide and the Special Foundation1 Considerations section as well as the Security Considerations section.

Deploying Crystal Reports for IFS EE

In order to preview Quick Reports of type Crystal, the reports to be previewed should be deployed in to a folder in the machine where the IFS Crystal Web Service is running. Create a folder in the machine where the IFS Crystal Web Service is running and copy the Crystal Report files (*.rpt file) that are going to be previewed from IFS EE. This folder is referred to as the OpenReportPath. In the installation process this folder is configured in the Web.Config file found in the IIS virtual directory for the IFS Crystal Web Service.

Considerations and design guide lines

If a Crystal Report is designed according to a couple of set principles, Foundation1 provides enhanced support that makes life easier for the end user. The benefits are.

In order for a report to take full advantage of the Foundation1 support, the following guidelines need to be followed.

Security Considerations

In order to guaranty security for reports executed on web or through IFS EE some considerations have to be made.

Note: This only applies when running reports from the web or through IFS EE. If a customer is not using the web interface or IFS EE, or does not wish to run the reports from the web or through IFS EE, the following is not necessary.

When a Crystal Report is executed through IFS EE, the Crystal Reports runtime creates it's own connection to Oracle. In order for this connection to use the same kind of security mechanisms as used when IFS EE accesses the database, the report needs to be created in a certain way. Creating the report this way will ensure that the end user does not get access to data he or she is not allowed to access. One typical example would be that different users running the same query against a view in IFS Applications gets different result sets based on their privileges (i.e the view has some row based security).

Constructing a report according to these guidelines involve adding a stored procedure to the report, manually at design time, and also linking this procedure to the main entry point in the report. For a detailed information on how to develop a report according to these guidelines, please refer to this step by step instruction.

In order to ensure that only reports that comply with these guidelines are executed in the environment, for IFS EE you need to set these information in the system parameter section, please refer to the IFS EE configuration guide for more details.

Known limitations

·    None of the above cases apply to the IFS integration towards Crystal Reports. The report format is identical for both versions. What we also concluded is that since the Crystal Report Vendor have stopped releasing corrections on XI Release 1, the only way to move forward when issues are discovered in the designer is to upgrade to Release 2 and apply a service pack that includes the fix for the specific issue. In this vase the problem is solved in SP3 for CR XI Release 2. We experienced problems when applying the patches on top of an old installation. Therefore we recommend you to start by removing any previous installation. The patched can be found from the Crystal Report Vendor patch/Service pack download page.
In order to upgrade the Crystal Reports Designer,
o      First download Crystal Reports XI Release 2 Service Pack 2 - Full build and install it.
o      Then download Service Pack 3 - Incremental Patch only and apply it on top of SP2.

Due to an Oracle sessions hanging issue in the Crystal .net runtime 13.0.1 version, it was seen that customers updated their Crystal Report .net runtime version to version 13.0.13 or above. After this update, the generally used \ alias character stopped working and an error was seen when you try to run a layout where the \ alias was used in the views inside the layout. For this Crystal suggested to manually add a registry entry to denote the invalid view alias characters. Add the registry key given below manually to the system registry or download this file and RMB on *.reg file and select "Merge" to add the entry to the system registry. This should be added in the machine where the Crystal Web Service is running. You will have to restart the Crystal Web Service after adding this registry entry.

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\SAP BusinessObjects\Crystal Reports for .NET Framework 4.0\Crystal Reports\Database]
"InvalidAliasCharList"="!(){}"

Example

See this example of creating a basic Crystal Quick Report to learn how to develop a simple Crystal Report that can be used from with IFS Applications.