Topic: Crystal Version and distribution Posted: 20 Jul 2015 at 7:29am
Hello and thanks in advance for reading.
I've been asked for opinion on how to distribute reports via a .Net application.
I was confused by SAP. What I heard was that reports in new Crystal versions (2011 - 2013) could not be written and distributed in a .Net application. (no runtimes?) That instead reports would have to be written in Crystal Reports in Visual Studio to be distributed. Is that correct?
So my questions
1. Can you write a report in Crystal 2013 and access it through a .Net application buy distributing the correct files with the App?
2. If the answer to 1 is yes then what are the licensing requirements?
3. If no then how can clients that have a copy of Crystal customize their own reports to work in this application? Do they all have to now buy Visual Studio?
4. Do you have any documentation for purchase that specifically deals with Crystal 2013 / .Net integrations?
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Posted: 14 Aug 2015 at 5:28am
I don't know all the answers, but here goes:
1) yes, you can design in CR and then embed in VS app
2) I don't know, I seem to recall that for recent CR version there is no licensing needed to redistribute (and I am could very well be wrong on this)
3) How you app handles custom reports is probably up to you...and not being a lawyer...if I own a copy of CR and create/modify a report and then use an app to display it...well why couldn't I do that?
4) no.
I would check/google specifically about licensing CR. I remember reading that CR 2008 you could pay a one time fee to redistribute, and I think that was completely removed in CR2010...but I don't remember exactly, and actually because of these stupid rules my company moved away from CR all together to a set of controls (XtraReports) that didn't have these issues and also had a control that would allow the users to customize the report from the application.
At first I was not a convert...there are things that CR just does better, and with that said, if i ever write an app that needs reporting in it...I'm using XtraReports just because of this functionality.
Hopefully, I didn't muddy the waters too much...
Oh yeah, I am now at a company that uses CR XI exclusively. So you never know.
Joined: 20 Nov 2006
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Posted: 24 Aug 2015 at 9:37am
The .NET SDK is no longer installed with Crystal. Instead, you have to download it. You can get the latest version here: http://scn.sap.com/docs/DOC-7824. There's also a good whitepaper about this here: http://scn.sap.com/community/crystal-reports-for-visual-studio/blog/2013/06/28/how-do-you-spell-confussion-cr-for-vs-crystal-2011-bi-4x-and-the-net-sdks.
If you only use your code for reports within your company, there is no license requirement. If you're going to have users from outside of your company accessing the reports, you will need to contact SAP Sales for licensing information.
Be aware that the Crystal SDK only allows for 3 concurrent users and 100 concurrent "print jobs". A report is a print job and a each run of a subreport within a report is a print job. So, for example, if you have a report with 200 records on it and a subreport for each detail, odds are that the report will fail due to the print job limit.
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