What's everyone's beef with Crystal Reports?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Daniel Billingsley
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Daniel Billingsley

At one of the VSLive! Orlando sessions there was much disdain expressed for
Crystal Reports for .NET by many. I'm wondering what the major issues are,
as I've always found it a pretty and effective tool, albeit not the most
intuitive thing to figure out. (And I've always wished you could save and
reuse formulas, but I understand that's now a feature in v. 10)

I like some of the things they've done with the Enterprise version, but I'm
skeptical about the licensing costs if I get serious about that direction.
Is that the major problem?
 
One problem we've been having recently is that some large, complicated
reports (600+ page with details and lots of joins) take an incredibly long
time to load (1.5 - 5 minutes). This has to be some sort of bug, but Crystal
support hasn't been at all helpful.

Another problem we have with it is that you have to install the files on the
client machine to use them, as opposed to System.* assemblies, which can be
downloaded and used at runtime. To really be able to do no-touch deployment,
you can't use Crystal Reports for .NET.

Chris Capel
 
I guess I should have added my interest in alternatives that solve these
types of problems. Is there a reporting engine that can be deployed like
this?

Also, if I understand things properly from the brief perusal of the
marketing stuff, using Crystal Enterprise would negate this issue as the
reports are actually all run on the reporting server and the .NET
application would then at most be just a tie from the app to the reporting
system. Can anyone verify that, if we're not getting too far OT?
 
We're looking into alternative reporting solutions right now for our app,
but so far we haven't found anything with the power, flexibility, and
end-user report designer of crystal. We're probably going to end up using a
combination of crystal reports and PDF. Most of the users on any of our
sites don't design reports, just look at them. PDF is perfect for that. The
few people that needed to design them could just use Crystal. Then we make
up a little app that takes all the crystal reports and generates PDFs for
them periodically. We haven't investigated the ability to do no-touch with
this sort of thing, but Acrobat Reader is a little more ubiquitous and
generally useful than Crystal Reports, and so easier to justify requiring on
every client, and safer to assume the presence of.

Chris Capel
 
SQLServer Reporting Services is coming out soon. I think the release date
was the 27th of this month.
It looks pretty good. Maybe you should look into that one.

As for the Crystal being very, very, very slow on opening large reports we
have run into that one. Also it will use up your disk space fast since it
creates a temporary file somewhere that can be very, very, very large if
your report is big.

Chris.
 
I saw something about a new report engine from MS for SQL. Maybe SQL
Reports or something. Have not used it or looked at, but seemed
interesting.
 
Are you getting "Load Report Failed"?

I had considerable trouble getting it working but got there in the end. I
checking the Crystal .NET developer support site and it was quite useful
(http://support.businessobjects.com/library/kbase/articles/c2011640.asp).
You need to either distribute another DLL or additional ASM (Merge Modules)
when deploying the application and all will work fine.

Good luck,
Joe

JasonF said:
We have been having trouble getting Crystal Reports for .NET (the version
Click to expand...
included free with .NET Visual Studio) working on Windows 98 machines. The
specs clearly state that Windows 98 se is supported. We update our test
machine with all the latest patches for both Windows and Crystal. Nothing.
Does anyone know anything about getting Crystal to work with Windows 98?
 
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