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Crystal reports XI - export datasource?

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by coolaid09

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Greetings,

An outside vendor created two reports in Crystal Reports XI that I've been asked to modify, even though I have no previous experience in Crystal Reports. I need to copy the reports from one server to another, in order to test them. However, the data sources are not actual database, table, or view names of anything that resides on our database server. Our DBA thinks Crystal Reports is creating a kind of pseudo table/view. I'm wondering:

1. Is there any way to export a data source (and report) from one server to another?
2. Is there any way I can determine exactly what data is being referenced by the pseudo view? I've tried poking at everything I can find in Crystal Reports, and have found no definative ties between the pseudo view and any of our other 'real' tables or views. I've looked at our existing views, and there are a few that look like they're the same or very similar.

And in case anyone was wondering, I've been told that we cannot contact the vendor that created the reports.

8 replies

by coolaid09

Unfortunatley, I need to export to another server, not to a PDF.

by shasca

Do you have Crystal reports installed on that other server? Copy the data over then.

Both of the links also show you how to modify reports once they are exported to another file format. Is that not your goal?

by coolaid09

I need to test the report on another server; having the report in another format won't help. And in order to do that, I need to copy the data source over, but there aren't any data sources by this name...unless the data source is somehow being stored in Crystal Reports, and data is being fed in from existing tables/views.

by dr dij

Typically, in ERP systems the data may not be in the exact format you want to make it easy to do a crystal report.

What vendors who are using crystal integrated with their system do:

have a program other than crystal extract data to a temporary table. the program may massage or modify the data according to business rules specific to that erp system.

At this point they then use a crystal template to report from the data.

So looking at your erp system there are no matching fields in the crystal report to the ERP database tables.

You should look at the report's definition to see the table in use. If not in your erp or whatever other data source then this is what they are doing.

because extracting the data and the crystal report are likely an integral process to this report, they can't be separated.

About all you could do is add fields or modify format, as long as the fields you want are in the temp data file.

We did this for some vendor supplied crystal reports, adding barcodes for workorder#s which was already in data file.

Of course this was complicated by crystal being run on a terminal server image, so fonts such as barcode need to be on the citrix server, not just the pc you are running the report on.

How do you trigger the report?

if it is from the .rpt file then it is just a crystal report. if it is from a vendor menu it may trigger a stored procedure or program as I mentioned then the crystal report. Just about every one of our 800+ crystal reports integral to our erp system ran this way, with the system prepping the data.

by coolaid09

Thanks for the info. What are some of the programs that extract the data to a temporary table?

We are using the Autonomy/Interwoven Teamsite content management system, which in turn, uses Crystal Reports for reporting. Upon further inspection of one of the administration tools, I found that the report I need to export the datasource for is listed as not having a datasource... So I'm trying to get permission to copy the report directly from one server to the other.

I should mention that a vendor other than Autonomy/Interwoven is who created the reports that we're trying to migrate.

by coolaid09

How do I access the information in the 'temporary table', and determine where it is pulling from?

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