1.  The first time that you run a report in your application, all of the Crystal assemblies that are required for processing the report are loaded into memory.  This takes a while and there's not much you can do speed it up other than adding more memory to the workstation where the report is being run.

 

2.  If possible, compile the report into your application rather than loading it from a file.  My experience has been that it takes less time to create a typed object for a specific report than it does to load it from a file.  If you want your users to be able to modify the reports or if you want to be able to distribute report updates without updating the software, you will not be able to do this.

 

3.  Do all of your data filtering in your application BEFORE you set the data source for your report.  When you're working with in-memory data sets, you don't have a database server to do filtering and grouping for you, so Crystal has to read ALL of the data and do the filtering and grouping as it's processing the data, so it takes much longer than having the database do the work.

 

-Dell

 

To prevent the exception, you need to be sure to explicitly call dtReport.Dispose() when the user is done with the report - usually in the OnClosing event handler of the viewer form, but that depends on your code.  The Crystal assemblies are wrappers around COM objects.  .NET memory management does not work well with COM objects so they always have to be explicitly disposed. 

 

-Dell