Unleashing the Dark Crystal: Crystal Reports that is… Beth L Gamble Senior Systems Analyst Smithsonian Institution National Museum of Natural History

Unleashing the Dark Crystal: Crystal Reports that is … Getting our data out of our CIS databases is just as important as putting it in. When it comes to formatted output, Crystal Reports is the method most often chosen. Leveraging Crystal to its full potential takes patience, trial and error, practice, and usually a kludge or two (or fifty). In this talk I would like to pass along some of my techniques and lessons learned for some trickier tasks associated with creating reports from EMu using Crystal. Let’s start with the basics…

The Basics … First Steps in approaching a new report: Design the output on paper first. Map data to EMu fields. Note fields required in report that appear together in a grid. (Useful for grouping in EMu report definition) Can I leverage an existing report with similar fields and format as a starting point? Best to not reinvent the wheel if possible. Create field list in EMu Report Definition. Let’s talk about some handy dandy rules to follow in this step…

Handy Dandy Field Definition Tricks … Group fields that appear in the client together in a grid. Rename groups, Group 1 and Group 2 are hard to decipher during Crystal report definition. Change date fields to value to text. Although EMu is great at partial dates, Crystal isn’t. If you have multivalue fields that you just want represented as lines of values, change to table to text. Easier than concatenating in a sub-report. Now lets move to the Crystal design …

Crystal Report Design Phase … Don’t be afraid to first look at the extracted.csv files generated to determine relationships. Add only the other.csv tables to the report that you know are a one-to-one relationship with the module.csv table. If you add a table to the main report that has a one-to-many relationship to the records in module.csv table than you will duplicate data or you will have to use Groupings. If there are multiple unrelated one-to-many relationship fields in your report they should be selected in a sub-report only. Sub-reports are your FRIEND!!! OK, now let’s get fancy …

Fancy or Kludgy, you decide … Using a subreport to concatenate multivalue fields. Formatting a report to flatten data and export as Excel file. Label reports generated a number of times determined by a numeric data value. This can be done manually or automatically with some nifty KE scripty magic. Double sided labels printed on letter sized paper to be cut to size, using two reports, a front label and a back label report…

Double Sided Label Report …

Conclusions... Be optimistic, assume it CAN be done. Save multiple version of your report adding tricks into a version one at a time. Be patient, don’t give up (or give in). I am truly convinced it all can be done, I just would need unlimited time to figure it out (heck don’t we all) …