I want to automate CR report printing from VB/VBA.
I have Crystal Reports XI Developer installed and .rpt files (some requiring parameters) to run and send to a printer, without requiring any user intervention.
Now, I stuck at the very first step, adding the correct libraries. There are probably about 50 libraries or so that start with Crystal Reports or Business Objects, and I have no idea which ones I need.
Any pointers to get me started would be appreciated.
Thanks
Martin
Ok, I solved my problem.
CRAXDRT.dll aka Crystal Reports ActiveX Designer Run Time Library is the correct library.
Here is some sample code:
Dim CR As New CRAXDRT.Application
Dim rep As CRAXDRT.Report
Set rep = CR.OpenReport(Range("CRpath"))
rep.ParameterFields(1).AddCurrentValue "Boston"
rep.ParameterFields(2).AddCurrentValue "Cars"
rep.Database.Tables(1).ConnectionProperties("Password").Value = "pw12345"
rep.ReadRecords
rep.PrintOut promptUser:=False, numberOfCopy:=1 ' promptUser:=True doesn't work
It depends on your budget, but I recommend a 3rd party program called Visual Cut (http://www.milletsoftware.com/Visual_CUT.htm). Using either a command line or the built-in GUI, you can process Crystal Report files pretty much any way you want, including PDFing, emailing, and even printing directly to a printer. So you can skip the VBA entirely if you want.
It's been around since 2002 and the developer has been continuously adding custom features to it by customer request, so it suffers a little from 'feature creep'. However, the manual (downloadable for free from the website) does a good job of keeping it all in perspective. Also, if you get the maintenance agreement, the developer is very responsive. In my case, he usually returns my calls within the day.
*(This isn't the developer talking, just a satisfied customer)
Related
All Reports when click the print button open a PDF option with
but I want to print straight to the print.
I've tried to change a few configurations on SSRS but does not work, my research so far:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/reporting-services/report-server/enable-and-disable-client-side-printing-for-reporting-services?view=sql-server-2017
This thread and its linked pages answers the challenge completely
https://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/5a631f79-a116-49b7-8f55-826c050a38ce/printing-from-ssrs-2016-dirrectly-to-printer-without-pdf-reader?forum=sqlreportingservices
http://printssrsreport.blogspot.com/
https://neelb.wordpress.com/2018/09/26/ssrs-enable-disable-client-side-printing/
Microsoft has intentionally limited direct printing without intervention for good reason.
In all scenarios printing reports is bad -- data is out of date immediately, paper wastage, print server administration (and automation if you go down that route)
Reading through the noise - Chrome browser offers a marginally better experience because it has an inbuilt PDF viewer - so the user experience would marginally better than having to open a separate application to view the PDF - from Chrome the facility to print the PDF is trivial
To achieve this, you need to do some programing using c#. I am not sure that you have this option available for you or not. In case, if you would like to see how it that code looks like refer below link. This might help. Even you can setup default printer and pass parameters like username, date range etc. I was looking for a way to set default printer using code and found this link.
ReportExecutionService
I use TFS , My question is how can i sure about that developer who work on a project can not copy source file and evict or extract them from office by Email,flash memory,USB,... ?
Is there any solution with TFS?
Can anyone help me?
TFS has no ability to do this, once a file has been retrieved from TFS it is just another text file on your computer you will have to use other tools to do what you want.
Opening it up to tools outside of TFS it is extremely difficult to do what you want to do but it is possible. Your best option is contact a security firm that often works with government defense contractors and have them set up your network IT security, some government defense contractors have the same requirements as you list and they would know all the things you would need to do.
Off the top of my head some of the things you will likely need to do is:
Use group policy to block writeable media from being used to block flash drives and CD-Rs.
Block internet access to stop webmail.
Block printing to stop people printing out the source then using a scanner and OCR software on another computer to turn it back in to code.
Not allow any device that can take photographs in areas where source code may be on screen as the same OCR procedure could be done with photographs.
This list is no where near complete and I would recommend contacting a security firm to get a complete list.
I've got an older VB.NET 2008 project, which uses Crystal Reports. In order to access the .rpt files I used Microsoft.InteropFormTools assembly. This has worked OK for a number of years. What this does is allows the user to specify what amounts to parameters to the reports in the Crystal Reports, and then click a button and out prints the report. (The user is not interested in previewing the report, so it prints directly to the printer, using Crystal.) The one problem, which I've never been able to figure out, is that sometimes (how, and under what circumstances I don't know, because I can reliably reproduce the error) loading the Crystal Report will cause an error flag to come up. Next Crystal will insist that the user enter parameters to the report before it previews them. OF course the users don't know what's going on, so what we've done in the past is just have the user start it over again, and Crystal normally is happy and sends the report to the printer.
However, we've got new users coming on board to do this, and they're not as forgiving. When I wrote this app 4 years ago, I let the CPU be “Any CPU”. I'm wondering if that could be the root of my problems with these Crystal reports not coming out. So, I've gotten into the project, and changed it from “Any CPU” to “x86”, which really is more appropriate, especially since our old version of Crystal is 32-bit. However, now that I've done that I've got a new error message popping up. Visual Studio 2008 is telling me that, “The system cannot find the reference specified”. In this case the missing reference is Microsoft.InteropFormTools. No other changes have happened to this application in 3 years, besides my changing the project configuration from “Any CPU” to “x86”. Could that be what's causing it to not be able to find the path to Microsoft.InteropFormTools?
My company has a Windows Forms application that leverages ClickOnce and .NET Remoting (soon to be WCF) to a back end IIS web application that handles all data access operations. For reporting, we currently use SSRS and have the distributed clients connect directly to the report server.
We would like to potentially remove, or augment, our dependency on SSRS reports with the ability to support local reporting via RDLC files. One hurdle that I have to overcome is that it is unlikely that the individual client machines will have direct access to the database and therefore would require the report data to be fetched from the web application over our Remoting or WCF transport layer.
"Discovering" the parameters of the report for purposes of dynamically building a UI of report parameter prompts I don't think is terribly difficult, but actually telling the back-end system what class/method to invoke in order to return the correct data for the report is less simple.
Has anyone experimented with somehow embedding information into the RDLC file (either through a comment in the report or otherwise) that can be used as a "hint" to the server application layer for determining what method to execute? It's likely that the actual RDLC will be stored in the database versus being distributed with our application.
Any insight or guidance would be appreciated.
-MrB
Check out www.gotreportviewer.com and the RDL viewer example (last sample on right side). It already has the code to load up the RDLC and parse the XML file to get the parameters out as well as the connection information and query information. Armed with that you should be able to use the backend to get everything and populate/load the report and run it.
As far as adding a hint or comment in the RDLC somewhere to specify what call to make I would suggest perhaps instead just using the report name as the hint. We've done this in the past for our reports to know what to call to load the data.
We've done something like this before :
VB Version:
Select Case GetReportName()
Case "SiteEval"
Using adp As New DataSetsTableAdapters.SiteEvalTableAdapter, _
objDT As New DataSets.SiteEvalDataTable
adp.Fill(objDT)
objLR.DataSources.Add(New ReportDataSource("DataSets_SiteEval", objDT))
End Using
Case ....
C# version:
switch (GetReportName()) {
case "SiteEval":
using (DataSetsTableAdapters.SiteEvalTableAdapter adp = new DataSetsTableAdapters.SiteEvalTableAdapter()) {
using (DataSets.SiteEvalDataTable objDT = new DataSets.SiteEvalDataTable()) {
adp.Fill(objDT);
objLR.DataSources.Add(new ReportDataSource("DataSets_SiteEval", objDT));
}
}
break;
Leveraging our XSD's and datasets to get our reports loading. In this case our local reports have access to the DB. In your case you could take this idea and fill the dataset with your own returned datatable from a call into your service. It's not the most elegant or easiest to maintain if you have a large set of reports.
In our case, we are now taking the RDL Viewer example and modifying it to our needs so that the above code is not needed. We will just pass in the path to the RDLC file and the code will load what is needed by reading the RDLC's xml. However, in this case the local report has access to the DB. It would not be to difficult I think to modify it to get it's data from an outside source either using the above code idea or modifying the RDL Viewer example from www.gotreportviewer.com as we are now doing.
With the RDL Viewer example modified we have a little something like this going at the moment (still working it out...) Code is in VB.
Dim r As New Report(Server.MapPath("App_Reports/" & GetReportName() & ".rdlc"), GetReportName())
Dim p As ReportParameterInfoCollection = r.GetParameters() 'read only....
If p.Count > 0 Then
Dim rptParams(p.Count - 1) As ReportParameter
Dim i As Integer = 0
For Each param In p
rptParams(i) = New ReportParameter(param.Name)
rptParams(i).Values.Add("99999999")
i += 1
Next
r.SetParameters(rptParams)
End If
r.LoadReport()
Goodbye ugly and long switch statement. Goodbye needing to know how to load the report....
Now if we can just figure out how to handle parameters a little nicer.... This code is a current work in progress but the RDL Viewer sample got us started quickly....
I also am playing with doing the same thing with Reflection. I found this article that makes the reflection work a breeze.
http://www.slimee.com/2009/09/net-using-reflection-to-execute.html
Now all you would do is pass in the string of your data table and it will produce the datatable driving the report. Since with datasets you will always know how it creates the names you can easily work with this.
The way I see it is both approaches are solutions that work at eliminating the ugly switch statements and will make the code easier to maintain. With reflection the code is much smaller but may be a bit slower.
Both have a bit of the magic string issue in them. Somewhere along the line you have to pass in a string of what you want to run. A team could easily create a convention that to easily solve though....
We are running Crystal Reports on a Windows Server 2008 with .NET framework 3.5 SP1.
I have seen many causes of the general error "The request could not be submitted for background processing." on other forums, however they tend to be persistent and repeatable affecting just a single report due to a specific formatting issue with a specific report.
We are seeing this error with the below stack trace, intermittently.
It affects multiple different reports we have.
It affects one particular report more frequently than other reports.
Once a report is affected the same error will often appear in multiple reports at approximately the same time eg. for the next 10 minutes.
The same report run with the same parameters may work when run again (soon after) or the application may need restarting before the report can be successfully re run.
These reports all worked previously without issue. No change in server or code seems apparent which would have precipitated this error. All code behind for this is VB.NET
We have had difficulty reproducing it in test environments and upgrading to the latest version of Crystal has not helped at all.
Any help or suggestions that you might be able to make to resolve this issue would be appreciated.
"The request could not be submitted for background processing."
at CrystalDecisions.ReportAppServer.Controllers.DatabaseControllerClass.ReplaceConnection(Object oldConnection, Object newConnection, Object parameterFields, Object crDBOptionUseDefault)
at CrystalDecisions.CrystalReports.Engine.Table.SetDataSource(Object val, Type type)
at CrystalDecisions.CrystalReports.Engine.ReportDocument.SetDataSourceInternal(Object val, Type type)
--- End of inner exception stack trace ---
at CrystalDecisions.ReportAppServer.ConvertDotNetToErom.ThrowDotNetException(Exception e)
at CrystalDecisions.CrystalReports.Engine.ReportDocument.SetDataSourceInternal(Object val, Type type)
at CrystalDecisions.CrystalReports.Engine.ReportDocument.SetDataSource(DataSet dataSet)
at "USER CODE"
After many days, finally I discovered what is the root of problem, in case you are including jpg images in your report.
The thing is that CR for VS2008 or later versions, can’t handle jpg files in CMYK mode. CR only can handle jpg files in RGB mode.
It’s funny that lower versions of CR (the one that came with VS2003) could handle any kind of jpg files. Thanks, Crystal.
For me the issue was with the Temporary Crystal Report that gets generated in the TEMP folder in Windows. There is a limit to the number of Temporary Crystal Reports that can be generated by Crystal report engine while processing it in a loop. Either the space in Temp folder runs out due to low memory in C drive or the limit of reports is reached after which in one single run crystal report cannot export further. It will give the error mentioned in question.
For me this issue was recurring at every 500 reports that were processed (I was generating the reports say, for a year and exporting them to a system folder one by one using my application)
The solution is simple. Always close and dispose the temporary .rpt Crystal Report file after exporting it .
for i as integer=0 to reportcount -1
Dim rpt as New MyCrystalReport
Dim filename as String = "MyReport" & i & ".Pdf"
//Query the DB obtain the dataset then set the datasource to the report
...
//Export the report
rpt.ExportToDiskCrystalDecisions.Shared.ExportFormatType.PortableDocFormat,fileName)
rpt.Close()
rpt.Dispose()
next
Isolate the report generation code.
Our final resolution was to take the code that was generating the report and move it into its own isolated service. Our original service then calls our new Crystal service with the relevant parameters and Crystal RPT file. This is obviously a costly solution as it involves modifying all report generation code to call the Crystal service instead. The Crystal service does not exhibit the error. The code had not changed besides that, so we can only presume the cause of the error was some interaction of the Crystal reports engine and the environment within our application.
Is there a chance the report object is leaked in the server's memory? I ran into a similar case where the report object was being stored into a Session object, so the report didn't need to get reloaded as the user navigated between pages. However, when the user was done with the report, the object remained in the Session, and wasn't cleaned up properly when the Session was destroyed by the server. I had to add a bit of code in the Session_End event in global.asax to find the report object and call the dispose method on it.
The fact that this appears intermittently but then affects all reports for a matter of 10 minutes makes me think it could be session-related. In my situation the server reached a limit on the number of reports that could be created on the server (in memory) because they weren't being released. The symptoms were similar to yours.
Hope this helps!
Try this: If you left any blank space at crystal report(header,footer or any sections) suppress it. that's all. I had this problem and i fixed this way.
I too have come across such issue, where I figured out the Column having Photographs was creating the issue. The way out was to convert the photograph (Datatype Image in SQL Server) from .NET Data set to byte and then save it as Bitmap. After , that this same BMP file can be converted to bytes and replaced to appropriate column of the identified row. By this the space reduced to a great extend and then after exporting the Report document and Datatable was disposed properly.