I know sounds like a silly question, but I have a reason.  In our app, the app gets the data from the database and then passes it to Crystal.  Crystal does know where the data came from, and luckily doesn't care, it just displays. So if you were using an app, you could do the same.

 

The other thought that I have is to use stored procs and have a formula for every field that would select the correct stored proc's field and use the formulas everywhere instead of the fields themselves.  This way, when you group, it would be grouping on the 'correct' field.  In a way...no it would be a complete pain to code, but it would make maintenance easier as there would only be 1 report to fix instead of 3.

 

Hope this helps.  Maybe someone has a more eleqant solution....

 

Oh, here is an idea tha might make life really nice...Make a stored procedure in one database.  Based on the parameter passed in, and the store would be a parameter, have the stored proc fetch the data from the correct database.  Now, the datasource and the columns are constant for Crystal, and life should be easy, the report is just a 'normal' report.

 

I haven't done this, but I pretty sure that the calling convention in SQL is database.owner.table, so shop1.dbo.table, shop2.dbo.table would give  instead of just dbo.table.

 

Hope this helps, it should make things much simpler.