Crystal Reports 8.5 Developer Edition

As is often the case with enterprise solutions, this product consists of two separate applications. The core package, Crystal Reports 8.5 Developer, is for accessing the contents of database tables and generating reports based on their contents. Wizards make this process extremely easy. You just specify the database you want to operate on, which can be local or accessible via an Open Database Connectivity (ODBC) link. Having done that, you can choose the tables and fields you want to extract values from. The wizards make it easy to specify which fields should serve as headers, and simplify the process of doing calculations on extracted values. In a report on the monthly sales of a multinational chain of stores, for example, you could group individual stores' sales figures by country, and calculate total sales figures for each country and for the chain as a whole. Wizards also handle formatting, so it's pretty easy to get neat-looking reports customized with your organizational logo. Wizards aren't limited to tabular reports: you can use them to generate reports that reveal details in response to clicks (so-called drill-down reports) and personalized form letters for mass mailings.

Going beyond the wizards, Crystal Reports 8.5 Developer offers a tool for visually creating joins among tables (by which you can consolidate the fields in multiple tables into a single report). It also makes it relatively easy to build SQL queries, mostly by exchanging syntax memorization in favor of a logically organized set of expandable trees from which you choose the commands you want. With SQL queries, you can do things like find the maximum value in a field across many records, or perform complicated text-searches on the contents of text fields. Managers and others who have been taught to revere database queries as a black art known only to database administrators will be delighted by the ease with which they can create reports to support their business decisions.

The other product in this package is Crystal Enterprise 8, which is capable of taking report documents from Crystal Reports and distilling them into publications that it then serves to network users. There are several ways to go about preparing reports for network publication, the simplest being nearly automatic conversion of Crystal Reports documents into Dynamic HTML (DHTML) files that standard Web browsers can read. With a little more work, Crystal Enterprise will serve reports in streaming form--meaning they're updated dynamically as their underlying data changes. It'll also generate Adobe Acrobat (PDF) files, as well as reports delimited by Extensible Markup Language (XML) tags. The XML feature is especially cool, because it means you can use Crystal Enterprise as an engine for generating business documents (such as invoices and purchase orders) that are fed to business partners via an XML-based information-exchange system, such as Microsoft BizTalk Server.

Because it's easy to use and flexible in its output, Crystal Reports 8.5 Developer Edition belongs in the toolkit of anyone who's responsible for sharing complicated information--especially numerical information--with others via a network. --David Wall

Amazon.com Product Description
Crystal Reports allows you to deliver rich, interactive content from virtually any data source, publish it to the Web, and integrate it within applications. It includes the following features: report viewers (including DHTML, ActiveX, and Java), a Web-based report-management system, Web server with licensing for five concurrent users, a customizable Web desktop, and report delivery regardless of location or platform.

There are also report types (subreports, conditional, summary, cross-tabs, form, drill down, OLAP, top N, multiple details, mailing labels), hyperlinks, charting, mapping, parameters, alerts, add-ins for Excel and Access, sorting, running totals, grouping, top N, bottom N, image format support, formula editor, experts, and more. The program also provides drivers and support for more than 30 SQL-, ODBC-, OLE DB-, and PC-based data sources, including XML.

It's unfortunate that there is no similar competitive product available. Otherwise, this product would be yesterday's toast.

Your report info is stored in a binary file. It's a nightmare in there. Plus, unexpected and inexplicable random corruption of the binary destroys a great deal of work. Back up often.

Installation procedure: poor
Ease of use: poor
Intuitiveness: poor
Documentation: poor
Technical support: poor
Reliability: poor


Programmer's Nightmare   March 6, 2002
13 out of 13 found this review helpful

I don't have the space to convey just how much production time is continually being lost to this abysmally bad product in our shop of senior developers. I could go on for days. Try a little experiment before buying it: go to the CrystalDecisions website and look at some of the most common errors reported. Basic stuff like INSTALLING the product, getting it ready to package up with an install application, pointing it to a DB through just about any connection technology. And it's all downhill from there. I still don't get why there isn't a better product out there yet.


Programmers beware.   November 26, 2001
Lawrence McGinnis (Running Springs, CA United States)
11 out of 14 found this review helpful

The program is full of holes and traps for the programmer. The new method of including the report in VB programs uses a lot of overhead and slows a VB program down if the number of reports is more then 4 or 5. Some necessary dependacy files are not included and it will not easly load onto computers not using the internet (a great many business computers). Crystal Software includes a 60 days support package that is not at all enough. Just visit the Crystal developer web site to view some of the problems. Save your money and use your older versions until they get it right.


Great But. . . .   October 13, 2001
2 out of 5 found this review helpful

Its great but you have to have the Crystal Reports Design Class I, II, -> V books to help you through it. Without these it is very time consuming and the only way to get these books is to attend the classes. They are not available for sale. As I just found out :-( (They do not come with this package as I had thought) 10-12-2001


Nice for reporting, but has some really annoying bugs   September 28, 2001
Jim Carson (Bellevue, WA)
21 out of 23 found this review helpful

Crystal Reports 8.5 provides a lot of features for designing reports on top of a relational database system and as far as consumer-tier goes, it's a fine product. Charts are pretty easy to use, the macro language is fairly powerful (and intuitive), and it's very easy to lay out items on the report.

There are several annoying problems with it:
1. During upgrade from a previous version, the installer removed the previous version, then complained it couldn't find a certain file needed to "prove" this was an upgrade. After reinstalling the previous version and repeating the process a couple of times, I found a workaround on the Seagate web site. Ugh... this shouldn't happen.

2. The table linker is nice, but it is more primative than the one in Microsoft Access. For example, if I'm joining three fields from table "foo" to table "bar," and I make one of those joins a "right join" then the others two parts of the table join should default to this. They don't and it errors out. I feel the tool could be easier to use.

3. On several occasios the query tool got hopelessly confused. It was often easier to write a custom view or macro query on SQL Server (or Oracle) than it was to use the reporting front end. The problem I have with this is it makes my particular installation harder to do because in addition to just shipping a standalone report, I have to ship a SQL query. I wish there were a way for me to reliably tell it "I KNOW what I'm doing... ust send the query as I've typed it to the database."

4. Occasionally when a query had problems with it and I attempted to preview the report, it would go into "infinite loop" mode. The only way out of this was to use Windows to "kill" the program. Quite frequently, I'd have crw32.exe just crash on its own when accessing a SQL database.