edit or modify crystal report within vb.net application - vb.net

how can i edit crystal report within vb.net application.
let me explain in deep.
i have an application for student management, i have use crystal report for reporting and now i deploy that app. everything it working completely, now different-different user have different-different requirement for reporting. now i want to provide and facility to the end user to edit or modify the crystal report within my .net application. can it is Possible? if it is possible than describe the whole process for that.

There is no such designer for crystal report that you can invoke at run time and enable your users to design reports.
Look for alternative approaches and make your and everyone's life easy :)
Install crystal reports for each user who want to create reports. But this may involve licensing.
Identify users' current and future requirements in details and based on these provide them generic type of reports with well designed filters and formats.
Design your reports in way where users' can customize the format i.e., whatever columns they want to see or hide.
One more thing, whatever business user asks is not always right or the best choice so educate users' for better solutions.

Related

SSRS 2005 Subscription changes

OK this is my question(s) and its SSRS 2005 and SQL Server 2005/2008
I had been tasked with rebuilding a dozen or so reports that our users use on their data systems. We just build them and since every DB instance is schematically the same for all our clients, we push the reports out to their report servers for use.
So modified a great many reports, but the reports have blown away the clients subscriptions. So every user that uses these reports, that can be a great many seeing as how everyone can have their own set of parameters, has to run the reports manually or redo their subscriptions.
My company would very much like to avoid that, but I can not figure out how to change a report, and even with the same parameter set going in as the last report, keep the subscription there.
Even when I copy the report down to their report server and replace the old with the new using same name. The subscription is still there, but it gets modified.
I am looking either for a way to push down a subscription as part of the report, so that they will have minimal input to their subscriptions in order to tailor it to their needs
--OR ideally--
Upload a new version of the report to their report server and just have the subscription apply to the newest report that I have put on their server
It doesn't really matter which one but the second is best seeing as how individual users use the reports with individual names as a parameter
Many thanks in advance for anyone that can point me to the way to manage out subscriptions on my side, or enable my reports to assume the subscriptions of same named reports on their server.
--edit--
Want to put a clearer picture out there
I have a master copy of a report. The users use the report on their own systems.
I do some heavy modifications to the master copy of the report, and upload it to their systems. using the same name and same parameter set as the original report.
I want the subscriptions on their report server to find this report using the same name.
so XXX.report has a subscription. I change it to XXX.report locally, and upload to their servers. The subscriptions are not synching though.
Thanks
I'm not sure how you're accessing SSRS but you can use the following webservice methods to download and upload report subscriptions
ListSubscriptions
GetSubscriptionProperties
GetDataDrivenSubscriptionProperties
DeleteSubscription
CreateDataDrivenSubscription
CreateSubscription
Using those methods, you use ListSubscriptions to get a report's subcriptions. The Subscription.IsDataDriven property will tell you if it's data driven or not. For data driven subscriptions, use GetDataDrivenSubscriptionProperites to get the subscription properties, otherwise use GetSubscriptionProperties. All of those classes are XML serializable so you can save them to disk out of the box using the XmlSerializer.
To readd the subscriptions, use DeleteSubscription to delete the subcriptions one by one and then CreateSubscription or CreateDataDrivenSubscription to readd the subscriptions.
This is a hack though, because you should be able to modify reports without breaking the subscriptions. You should to the following to help diagnose the issue
Set SSRS logging to verbose for all components
Use the click once report builder to change the title of a report and see if the subscriptions break when you click save
Have the SQL profiler running on the ReportServer database to see what SQL is being generated when the subscriptions break
there's a tool called Reporting Services Scripter from Jasper Smith. I think it should work for you.
What I had to wind up doing was going back and change all the input parameters, including the sql content for the drop downs, back to what they originally were. Then playing with the SQL for the report to accept the new(old) parameters.
Thanks for your input. I accepted the web services answer as that is a path I will have to explore for our next update.

Automate report download from SAP Business Object Infoview

I am new to SAP Business Objects Infoview and was asked if I can automate the report data generation for an existing report.
Here is what I would do manually through the Infoview web interface:
Click schedule for the report in question, which brings up the Schedule dialog
Change the recurrence to Now
Change the report prompts (start date and end date) so that start date=today and end date=today-14 days
Set the format to CSV and output the report to the Inbox
Schedule the report
Wait for the report to succeed
Download the generated report data
I can see how I could build a tool using Java and Selenium to automate this. However I am wondering if there is a more elegant way to doing this that still allows me to set the prompts dynamically. Are there existing 3rd party tools? Can I use JDBC?
What I have at my disposal is a user name/password to log on to Infoview. If a more elegant solution requires additional access or software please let me know.
It's possible with a simple addition to the universe (but this, of course, requires universe developer access). For your example, you could create a new universe-based Predefined Condition object with a definition of: (assuming Oracle)
start_date = trunc(sysdate) and end_date = trunc(sysdate-14)
Adding this object to a report will produce the desired timeframe whenever it's run, whether it's scheduled or interactive.
If you want the same report to run with this logic when scheduled, but still allow users to select dates via the prompts. You can use magic dates. See this blog post for info.
Lastly, you could write a custom program that would open the report, populate the prompts with the appropriate values, and run it. But I would consider that a less-preferable option than the ones above.
You can use UiPath in order to easily automate SAP GUI without writing code.
Here's a tutorial on how to automate data entry, menu navigation and screen scraping on SAP.
You can use it from code (SDK) or you can create workflows (visual automation) directly from UiPath Studio.
Note: I work at UiPath. You should also try other visual automation tools like Automation Anywhere, WinAutomation, Jacada, use them side by side and choose the one that suits better your needs.
Here's how automating SAP Business One menus, buttons and typing looks like:

Request for Custom Reporting on the Web

I have had a request where a user wants the ability to create their own reports. I have developed and MVC4 application and it currently uses Crystal Reports to generate a pdf of the report.
Obviously Crystal reports allows the developer to drag an element anywhere on the screen. The user now wants to be able to create their own reports and have the ability to move the controls around to where they wish.
Is this possible at all and/or are there any variations to Crystal reports that will allow this? Ideally this will need to be done on the Web too!!
Any direction would be appreciated, thanks

Dynamically generating reports in Pentaho and dealing with report definitions store in the database

I am developing a reporting application where a user can select(and order) reports from a list of 100 reports and ask for a master report. This master report will contain all the selected reports in the exact order and with a table of contents listing the reports included in the master report. The reports available for the user to select (which could be 100s) are stored in the database.
My questions are :-
To generate the master report with the user selected reports, the only solution I can see is using the Reporting Engine API to generate a dynamic report into which I have to add the user selected reports as subreports. Is this the right and easiest way to approach this problem? Does anyone have samples of the Reporting Engine API usage especially to inject subreports in a Master report?
Since I am storing the reports in the db(blobs), I am trying to find a way to generate my sub reports with an inputstream rather than a URL as specified in ResourceManager.createDirectly(url, MasterReport.class), but haven't been successful till now. How can I generate reports from definitions stored in the database? There should be some resource abstraction.
Read your reports into a byte-array and then use the ResourceManager.createDirectly method as usual. That will solve your problem of parsing the reports.
You can parse them directly into SubReports by using
ResourceManager.createDirectly(bytes, SubReport.class)
These subreports can then be added to your master report as banded subreports. if you want your selected reports to start on a new page, make sure you set the "pagebreak-before" style on your subreport's report-header.
There is a resource abstraction: It is called "LibLoader" and you can create your own ResourceLoaders that deal with the problem of getting your data out of your database as raw-streams so that the ResourceFactory implementations can interpret/parse the raw-data.
But every database is designed differently and thus you as the system integrator have to write the glue code for it. We only can offer the interfaces.

Custom Report Items in local reports

i have read this article about custom report items(CRI)
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc188686.aspx
The only problem is that CRI are only usable in reporting service and not in local reports. My question is it possible some how to use CRI in local reports( RDLC ). Also i am interested in which version of reporting service is this possible, if possible
Best Regards,
Iordan
Custom report items are not supported in .rdlc files. (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms251712(v=vs.90).aspx) This is likely the approach taken by Microsoft because the ReportViewer used with these files is a free control, while more complex features like third-party controls are supported only on a full SQL Server report server.
One thing in particular I have done in the past to get around this is generate custom charts/controls/images etc. As images and then send them into the report as an image. Not an ideal solution but it works.