Crystal Reports Version 9 Offers Host Of New Features

With this latest version, users can share data more easily by reusing report components that can be shared across multiple reports. Version 9 also includes a new, complete Java software developer's kit (SDK) written purely in Java that's comparable to its old COM SDK but can now provide native reporting through a J2EE application server.

Crystal Reports features a number of expert dialogues to help users develop sophisticated connections to resources such as OLAP, databases and advanced internal report functions. The OLAP features are some of the easiest and most powerful to use. Unfortunately, the way Crystal Reports harvests multipage OLAP data is still CPU-intensive, since it gathers all of the data before a page is processed.

The new version also can integrate reports into Microsoft Visual Studio .Net. The .Net support is basically built on top of the COM API that Crystal Decisions included in previous versions. The company says users can now have XML Web services directing report generation, but documentation is lacking.

As in previous versions, the software provides XML connectivity through a Merant ODBC driver. It is still somewhat restrictive when it comes to the number of formats in which data can be imported.

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When working with XML files, hints must be added to tags in each file if the file format deviates from the format required. For instance, if the number of nodes or tags in the XML file do not reside under one parent node, then hints must be added so the parser does not omit data or disassociate fields in the file. Unfortunately, XML connectivity is still not conducive to multiformat, wide-scale XML content access. What's more, only four types of XML files with specific identifiers can be used by the driver.

The new version supports Microsoft Office Smart Tags in Office XP. Data can now be exchanged by linking certain objects using Smart Tags, providing another viewable option for users. The product is only offering viewable fields that can be used by an Office XP application.

One snag is that reports must be published to a Web server to be viewable using Smart Tags, and the Web server must be capable of using that functionality. Publishing those reports will likely be left up to developers, since debugging will be a difficult task for end users.

The new Crystal Reports version offers an interactive Report Part Viewer that lets users export reports to Excel, HTML and Word. The viewer is lightweight and useful for off-site users that don't require viewing reports in their entirety or that have poor Web connections. The viewer can be integrated with Web applications.

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