>>hi all,
>>
>>i've been wondering. Have any of you worked with Crystal Reports 5/6? I created a report in 6 (5 too), that we are using in our product through an activeX control. In the process, i found that it was very 'buggy'. I was wondering of you have had the same experience. For instance :
>>
>>1.aligning fields proved to be close to impossible. Fields seem to have a will of their own, and sometimes they refuse to move (using the arrow keys). The report looks nice from a distance, but that's it.
>>2.Furthermore, you can't use cursors, so you need to store tables.
>>3. It's not OO
>>
>>As far as i can see, its multipass (and therefore subreports) feature, is the only reason to use it. Do you know of any other 3rd party products that would enable me to:
>>-create subreports
>>-OOP-ify my reports
>>
>>I am curious of your findings...
>>
>>greetings,
>>derk
>
>
>I've heard good things about actuate (
www.actuate.com). I just got the demo today. Won't be able to look at it until after DevCon.
>
>As for the "problems" with Crystal, it aligns things a different way. You can "snap" to lines. The Active-X control was written in VB and has the same problems in VFP as all VB activeX controls. We are using it and things are working.
What I did to 'solve' the ActiveX problem was to create an automation server in VB that uses the ActiveX control and the Common Dialog control. I pass a report directory to the server as a string (which will display all crystal reports in a directory folder) along with an ODBC datasource string. Upon choosing the desired report, the report is previewed in the crystal preview window, complete with drill-downs, print, search buttons, etc. that crystal provides nicely. I call this report server from VFP. Of course, I have found problems with Crystal (or maybe VFP's ODBC driver.) For example, crystal seems to treat datetime fields as date fields, and logical fields are treated as numeric values of 0 or 1. Crystal also does not support file datasources, which makes distribution difficult. The graphs are another story...
Ryan Hirschey