Hello Pooja,

First of all, I need to thank you for taking time in putting all these info,which is very helpful.

I have few questions for you.

I am planning to develop a reporting tool, which is currently in VB 6/CR8.5,to be converted to JAVA and CR 8.5.

The reporting needs are very complicated. I guess instead of calling the reports from VB, I can pass the same parameters from JAVA (SWING) to get the
work done.

One more major requirement is to convert to PDF format at run time, which has been done with VB, is there any know issues with JAVA for exporting CR to PDF.

Do send me your comments.

Once again, great job, for helping the CR community.!!!

Regards

Mahesh Bhaskar

Hello Mahesh,

Thank you for appreciating my work.

You can very well pass the same parameters from Java(Swing) application .

Honestly,I have not tried Exporting CR to PDF ;but I can surely suggest that you can try Calling Crystal Report using an EXE method,descibed on my web - page : http://home.attbi.com/~pooja.mohan/files/execalling.html inorder to export your report to a PDF format.

Here is an extract from the Crystal Decision's website which you might want to go through :

Crystal Reports 8.5 allows exporting to PDF. Exporting to PDF in Crystal Reports 8 and lower is not supported. Crystal Reports 8 and higher allows exporting to RTF.

Exporting to PDF or RTF in Crystal Reports 8.5 retains the best WYSIWYG (What-you-see-is-what-you-get) format of the original report.

Exporting to PDF and RTF in Crystal Reports 8.5 support many features that other exporting formats cannot.

For information on ALL the formats that Crystal Reports has exporting functionality to, download the applicable document from our website at:
http://support.crystaldecisions.com/docs

· For Crystal Reports version 7, search for : SCR7ExportLimitations.zip

· For Crystal Reports version 8, search for :  SCR8_ExportLimitations.zip

· For Crystal Reports version 8.5, search for :  cr85_exportlimitations.zip

These documents also list all supported and unsupported exporting features in Crystal Reports 7, 8, and 8.5.

NOTE: ======

This export DLL is designed to work with Adobe Acrobat 4.05 or later.

Pooja M.,
http://home.attbi.com/~pooja.mohan

Hello Pooja,

One more question !!!

Can I map Crystal Reports with XML data ? So instead of getting the data from the Database, I will generate an XML file of all the data required, and then feed it to Crystal Reports, to generate the reports and convert to PDF.

Any comments ?

Thanks
Mahesh

Hello Mahesh,

Though I have not tried it personally,but I am pretty sure that the Crystal Reports Version 8.5 completely supports XML ,and so,users can access XML data directly or export data to XML.

I would like you to go through the new features that have been added to Crystal Reports 8.5 from Crystal Decisions Official Website to confirm the above.You can simply follow this link :

http://www.crystaldecisions.com/products/crystalreports/downloads/cr85_whatsnew_datasheet.pdf

Regards,

Pooja M.,
http://home.attbi.com/~pooja.mohan

Thanks for you response,

We can export Crystal Reports to XML, but my question was to Import XML data, to CR and then convert to PDF, instead of mapping to database.

OR

Can we convert XML to PDF directly without going through Crystal reports.

Regards
Mahesh

Yes,we can import XML data to Crystal Reports using version 8.5.

I know of a tool which can convert XML to PDF directly .It is called Big Faceless Report Generator is a Java component for creating PDF documents from XML.You can visit their website @ http://big.faceless.org/products/report/index.jsp

Even ,Adobe has something to offer .You can use a software called FrameMaker+SGML( http://www.adobe.com/products/framemaker/main.html ) to convert XML to PDF directly.

 

Regards,

Pooja M.,
http://home.attbi.com/~pooja.mohan