Crystal Reports Training by Ken Hamady, MS, Reporting and Training Nationwide
The
Crystal Reports Underground News - Volume 2004.03 (March 2004)
an independent source
for Crystal Reports Information by Ken Hamady
Contents for March, 2004:
**
Summary
of Crystal Enterprise v10 Options and Pricing
** New "Business Days" Formulas:
** "Wonderful how you related our data into the course material"
** Special Offer on SPL 2 and .rpt Inspector 2
** Visual Cut 3.0
** My Library of Crystal Reports Materials:
Expert's Guide to Formulas
Expert Techniques Volumes I and II
Quick Reference to Crystal Reports in Visual Basic
Quick Reference to Crystal Reports in VB.NET
** Parameter remembers last choice in v10
** Locking the size of a Box by going past the margin
** New formula for 6-digit number to date.
** Changing the Btrieve DAT file used by a report
** Read back issues at http://www.kenhamady.com/news.html
Crystal Enterprise v10 Options and Pricing:
Kevin
McManus of 5x Technology recently sent me a PDF that outlines Crystal
Enterprise
v10 configuration options and features. You will find it on the
LIBRARY
page of my site. Here is the short version with my own comments
and
some approximate list prices. These prices do not include annual
maintenance,
which is an additional 20%. In the past maintenance has been
required
in the first year, but that may not be true currently. Government
and
Educational discounts run about 20% below these prices. Resellers
like
CDW are currently only selling Embedded and Express Editions to the
public,
but they are selling Professional and Premium on their government price
schedule.
There are 4 editions of Crystal Enterprise:
Embedded (RAS)
This is for Web developers who want to develop COM, Java or .NET
applications.
You get a version of this edition for free with Crystal Reports v10
Developer
Edition, but this only allows you to create a test application.
To deploy
your application you must upgrade to the Advanced Developer
Edition.
Alternately, you can buy a processor license for the Embedded Edition
for
about $25,000 from several web sites.
Express
Unlike the older CEv9 Standard, the new CEv10 Express only supports
named
users, not concurrent users. This means that it has security
features
but it does not include scheduling, business views or several other
features
of CE Professional. It is also limited to a single server so it
is only
appropriate for smaller environments. It comes for free with
Crystal
Reports v10 Professional and includes your first 5 named users.
Additional
users are about $450 per user. These are also available from
several
web sites.
Professional
This can be deployed with named and/or concurrent users. It
supports
multiple server installations and Unix servers. Unlike Express,
it includes
scheduling, alerts and business views. Five named users of CEv10
Professional
come for free with CRv10 Developer, but these can only be used for
testing.
To deploy your 5 users you must upgrade to the Advanced Developer
Edition.
The cost to expand beyond the 5 would be:
$700 per Named
User
(NUL) minimum of 25 (5 from some resellers)
$4,100 per Concurrent User
(CAL)
minimum of 5
$64,500 for a Processor
license
Premium
Includes all the features available for Crystal Enterprise, including
Ad Hoc
reporting and Excel Analysis on the web. The prices are:
$1,000 per Named
User
(NUL) minimum of 25 (5 from some resellers)
$5,900 Concurrent User
(CAL) minimum
of 5
$88,000 for a Processor
license
Also, note the following
changes
in the licensing:
1) It now explicitly states in the license that Developer Edition
cannot be
used to deploy Crystal Enterprise other than for testing. CD
tried to
fudge that in v9 by saying in the marketing literature that the
Developer
Edition was 'intended' for testing, but the license didn't have a
restriction.
With v10 it is clear that you have to buy the Advanced Edition to do
deploy
anything more than Express.
2) If you use CAL licensing you are no longer allowed to use an
external program
to queue requests for optimal processing.
New "Business Days" Formulas:
One
of
my most popular formulas is the one that allows you to find the
"Business
Days" between two dates, ignoring holidays and weekends. I have
updated
this formula hold the holiday list in a separate formula. I have
also
added a formula that allows you to add a specified number of business
days
to a date, skipping both holidays and weekends. See the Formulas
page
on my web site.
"Wonderful how you related our data into the course material" - KW:
This
comment
is from one of my classes in December. My specialty is teaching
at
your office, with your data, and I charge about half of what Crystal
charges
for on-site classes. I have personally taught over 1600 satisfied
students
and I am still the all-time, top ranked Crystal Reports expert at
Tek-Tips.com.
To schedule a class, or for more information, give me a call at (540)
338-0194.
Special Offer on
SPL 2
and .rpt Inspector 2:
Software
Forces has just released updates to 2 of their most popular products,
and
are offering special savings for the rest of March:
rpt Inspector 2
This is the only tool I know of that allows you to search across
multiple
reports for a specific feature, like a formula, and then change that
feature
in all of the reports in one stroke. Version 2 is full of dozens
of
improvements and it now fully supports subreports. It can be used
with
versions 5 through 9 of Crystal Reports. The cost is $395 but
this month
save $100 on your purchase. See the LINKS page of my site for
more
information and a free 30-day trial.
SPL 2 (Smart Pick Lists):
SPL is designed to fix one of the glaring limitations in the Crystal
Reports
product line, the ability to have parameter fields generate dynamic
pick lists
at runtime. SPL solves this problem for Crystal Enterprise
users.
It allows you to generate both dynamic and cascading pick lists.
The
cost is $6,000 but this month save $500 on your purchase. See the
LINKS
page of my site for more information and a free 30-day trial.
Visual Cut 3:
Millet
software has just released a new version of Visual Cut, their tool for
scheduling,
exporting, bursting and Emailing reports. Visual Cut 3.0 has an
improved
user interface and allows you to get updates to the software
online.
New features include the ability to create PDF Bookmarks from both main
and
subreport groups and command line parameters to define several common
date
ranges. Visual Cut is still only $225. See the LINKS page
of my
site for more information, or contact me if you would like to request a
trial
version.
My Library of Crystal Reports Materials:
Expert's
Guide to Formulas ($36)
http://www.kenhamady.com/form00.html
Expert Techniques Vol. I ($19) and Vol. II ($19)
http://www.kenhamady.com/expert.html
Quick Reference to Crystal Reports in Visual Basic ($16)
http://www.kenhamady.com/vbref.html
Quick Reference to Crystal Reports in .NET ($14)
http://www.kenhamady.com/ntref.html
Parameter remembers last choice in v10
I
just
noticed another little feature added to CRv10 and not mentioned
anywhere.
When you refresh a report that has parameter fields from within CR the
parameter
will remember the value you selected the LAST time (in the same
session).
This becomes the default value. In previous versions of CR, each
refresh
would reset the parameter to the original default value. Read
last
month's newsletter for my review of CRv10.
Vertical Height of a box gets Locked (v8 - v10)
I
had
a box on my report and was sizing it in preview mode. Suddenly I
noticed
that I could not move the box up or down, or change the vertical size
by using
the sizing handles. The first few times I thought I was missing
the
handle, but soon it was clear the size would change and then snap back
to
the original size. I finally realized that I had accidently sized
the
left edge of the box out side of the printable area of the
report. When
I went into "Object Size and Position" I noticed that the "X" was a
negative
number.
While Crystal would preview the box with an edge in the non-printable
area,
it would no longer allow vertical movement in preview, and depending on
the
version might also lock some coordinates in design mode as well.
The
solution was to bring the edge of the box back into the printable area.
This
could be done either by dragging the sizing handle or setting the
coordinate
to zero. Now the box could be sized again. Variations of
this
behavior could be found in versions 8, 9 and 10.
New formula for 6-digit number to date:
I
have
a formula on my site that allows converting an 8-digit number into a
date.
However, the formula assumes that the number is in YYYYMMDD
format.
I recently had a customer whose system date was a number in MMDDYY
format,
which meant that it could be 5 or 6 digits in length with only a 2
digit year.
I wrote a formula for him to use and have posted it with formula #2 on
my
FORMULAS page.
Changing the Btrieve DAT file used by a report:
Those
of you using Btrieve (DDF and DAT files) may run into a problem when
you try
to have the report read a different set of DAT files than those used at
the
time the report was created. This has come up twice for me with
folks
doing a PeachTree upgrade. It appears that Crystal Reports v9
won't
let you set the location to a new DAT file unless it can still find the
old
DAT file in it's original place at the same time. The simply
solution
is to put a copy of the original file in its original path until you
have
completed the "Set Location". Alternately, you can download the
hot-fix
for this as described in the following Knowledge Base article:
http://support.businessobjects.com/library/kbase/articles/c2014632.asp
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Contact
Information:
Ken Hamady, MS
525K East Market St.
PMB 299
Leesburg, VA 20176
(540) 338-0194
ken@kenhamady.com
http://www.kenhamady.com
Copyright 2004 by Ken Hamady
All rights reserved -
Republishing
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