One of the most common questions I get asked when training / consulting clients on Crystal Reports is. “Can I share my report with others so that they can run the report?” In the past I have always pointed them to a few options. Export the report as a PDF or Excel file, Share the report with the Crystal report Viewer, or for the larger clients use Crystal Enterprise to share the report. All three solutions while viable have their limitations. Exporting looses drill down features or the ability to refresh the data. The CR Viewer while it supports drill down does not support the refreshing of data. Then there is Crystal Enterprise… well we’ll just leave it at that ( Maybe it should be Enterpri$$e).
Well I am happy to say that in reading a recent newsletter from ( a personally respected and favorite resource) Ken Hamady http://kenhamady.com/cru/ I saw mention of a third-party viewer which supports the refreshing of data / parameters within the Viewer. The viewer mentioned is the Data Link Viewer. Which allows users to run reports without having the ability to open the RPT files in the designer. I found this was a great and much welcome feature as the DLV also the report by creating in essence a read only file which protects proprietary business calculations, as well as prevents unwanted tampering of the report.
More info on the DLV and other cool crystal report add-in’s can be found at: http://www.milletsoftware.com/
Happy Reporting!
