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Dory
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   Topic: Upgrading to Crystal XI
Posted: 05 Mar 2007 at 9:53am |
My company has been offered an opportunity (for a limited time) to upgrade to Crystal XI. This includes our Crystal 8.5 Developer licenses as well as our Visual Studio .NET 2003 licenses.
An opportunity to upgrade to Visual Studio .NET 2005 will not occur until our next fiscal year in 2008.
I'm searching for both pros and cons comments on upgrading to Crystal Reports XI in either the Crystal Reports Developer environment as well as Visual Studio .NET 2003 environment.
Please direct me to posts that already address this topic, or share your own thoughts. All will be appreciated.
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BrianBischof
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Posted: 05 Mar 2007 at 10:17am |
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Upgrading from Crystal Reports 8.5 to XI is a big jump in versions. There have been LOTS of feature improvements and user interface improvements since then. Not only that, but the the data access libraries have been completely rewritten to increase stability and performance. Plus, the Dynamic Cascading Prompts has been a "most wanted feature" for years and they finally added it to the XI release.
Regarding Visual Studio 2005, I wouldn't hesitate to upgrade the licenses there as well. A few months ago I made the upgrade to 2005 and with ASP.NET there are too many new features to mention. VS 2003 was a "1.0" release and they have made lots of improvements in the 2005 edition. Crystal Reports has improved printing from the web, better object library for referencing parameters, a better user interface. I couldn't imagine NOT upgrading when given the chance.
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hilfy
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Posted: 05 Mar 2007 at 10:28am |
We recently upgraded from 8.5 to XI. If you're using a VS 2003 app to view your reports, our experience was that all of them have to be upgraded to XI in order to be able to set the logins correctly - the actual structure of the .rpt files changed with v9.
The other issue that we ran into was with our reports that connected to Oracle (the SQL Server reports were fine.) The Oracle-based reports lost all of the links between the tables - everything appears fine in the Database Explorer, but the links between the tables didn't get translated into the SQL. We had to recreate these reports from scratch, just saving the existing report in XI didn't work, and recreating the links didn't work. Fortunately, you can copy the fields and formulas from the original report, so it's a fairly easy thing to do.
-Dell
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Dory
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Posted: 06 Mar 2007 at 5:16am |
Brian -
Thank you so much for responding.
I'm OK w/ upgrading our VS .NET 2003 because most of the applications have internal Crystal Reports that use data sets. The upgrade is a "no brainer". However, we have one VB .NET Windows application that is just a simple CR Viewer used to view external Crystal 8.5 reports. What will upgrading to Crystal XI for VS .NET 2003 do to our CR Viewer and the external Crystal 8.5 reports? Is XI really backward compatible in this scenario?
BTW, I LOVE your book; I have found it extremely useful. I look forward to acquiring a copy of your new one - Crytal Reports Encyclopedia. Also, thank your for starting the Crystal Reports Forum. I've had some challenging times trying to find content on the web to similar problems I'm having w/ Crystal and potential resolutions. The BO site is getting better too - I've been able to find some things on Kanisa recently. Your forum has already been quite useful to me. Thank you again.
Dory
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Dory
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Posted: 06 Mar 2007 at 5:31am |
"hilfy"
As I responded to Brian, I'm concerned now that XI is not really backwards compatible, that there are some gotcha's. Yes, we have a CR Viewer written in VB .NET as a Windows app for viewing our Crystal 8.5 reports, as these reports are for projects outside of our VS .NET 2003 development environment. Fortunately, we don't have to worry about Oracle. To date, we use only SQL Server 2000.
When you say that you had to upgrade each report to XI in order to set the logins correctly, is that simply opening the report in XI, then doing something like Log on/off Server or Set location? (BTW, we've used Set Location to implement what we refer to as "DSNless" connections, so all our reports are currently DSNless.) Or is there more to it?
Dory
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hilfy
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Posted: 06 Mar 2007 at 8:52am |
It's for setting the table login information for the reports. This uses the ReportLogons property of the report object. I'm sure there's sample code for this in Brian's book.
-Dell
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Dory
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Posted: 07 Mar 2007 at 7:57am |
Dell - or anyone who may wish to comment. All will be apprecitated.
I have a more specific question relating to your comment about the logon properties...
The CR Viewer that we have opens external Crystal Reports 8.5 files. They are DSNless - i.e., they use an OLE DB connection. They are not part of the application. The application uses a OpenFileDialog box to allow the user to select a report to run.
If we upgrade our VS .NET 2003 to use Crystal Reports XI, will the Crystal Reports 8.5 rpt files still need to be touched? Or, will they still work OK just as they are right now after the upgrade to XI?
Dory
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hilfy
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Posted: 07 Mar 2007 at 9:33am |
Probably the only thing you can do is test it. We have to set the logins because we use different databases in Dev, QA, Prod Staging and Production.
-Dell
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Dory
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Posted: 07 Mar 2007 at 9:49am |
Dell -
Thank you so much for all your responses. You're right about testing - I think that will be the ultimate test. I really appreciate your sharing of knowledge. At this point, I'm not sure what we'll do about the limited time offer on the XI upgrade. If we do decide to upgrade, I will try to remember to post what I discover during my testing.
Thanks again,
Dory
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