Crystal Reports 9 review

Crystal Reports creates structured reports from databases by selecting fields from source data and grouping them appropriately. Reports can include calculations, such as totalling the items in each group and graphing numeric data. Once the structure of a report is complete, the final document may be distributed over the Web or embedded into other documents and applications.

Beyond the basic reporting tools included in products such as Microsoft Access, Crystal Reports enables you to use multiple data sources in different database formats. This makes it well suited to large businesses that need to analyse complex data for business intelligence tasks.

Version 9 brings with it additional tools for web-based reporting as well as a repository feature and improved template controls. Usability is also better than in previous releases, but this is still a tool for technically adept users.

One of the product's traditional strengths has been the array of data types it supports, with version 9 increasing the list to over 30. These range from desktop data sources such as Microsoft Access and Paradox to enterprise-level products including Oracle, SQL Server and DB2. To complete the range of features, XML and OLAP tools are also provided, but the omission of support for FileMaker is a surprising and inexcusable exception.

This release adds tools for building connectors to custom database formats using JavaBeans, COM or ADO .NET. There's also support for thread-safe database drivers, enabling simultaneous updates to data in a report even if it's from multiple sources. For web-based reporting, this provides faster update times and a more consistent display of information. Support for Unicode is also introduced, allowing for data stored in most languages to be accessed by the product, as well as data in multiple languages combined within a single report.

The new repository feature is welcome, providing a means of reusing report components. SQL commands, images and text objects can now be stored centrally and made available to all Crystal Reports 9 users. As a result, complex SQL commands now need only to be built once and reused in future reports. To some extent, this simplifies an otherwise overly complex program, as SQL coding can be done by a database expert with the end results made available to less technical users. On this note, support for SQL commands has also been extended, including the ability to create unions between tables and execute subselects. It's also possible to add input parameters to commands and store them with the relevant SQL code in the repository.

The repository can also be used to store frequently used images and blocks of text, such as contact details, as well as formulae for carrying out actions on report data. As with SQL commands, you're able to amend the content of a text or image object within a report and re-save it to the repository either as a separate entity or as an update to an existing item. However, it isn't possible to 'lock' individual objects to prevent them from being edited.

A selection of predefined functions covering date, financial, formatting and mathematical calculations are supplied as part of the product, but a new Function Workshop is also included for creating custom code. This is an improvement over the Formula Expert found in previous versions of Crystal Reports and also provides a Wizard-style interface for less experienced users.

Previous versions of Crystal Reports were cursed with cumbersome tools for report formatting. This release includes a new Custom Templates feature, which at least provides the ability to reuse a design once it's been created. Templates may include graph conversion features - a means of quickly converting numerical tables into more visual formats - as well as formatting. Multiple templates can be applied to a single report, so layouts and graphics from different sources may be combined to produce new designs.