What's New in Crystal Reports 2008

What's New in Crystal Reports 2008

Copyright

2007 Business Objects. All rights reserved. Business Objects owns the following U.S. patents, which may cover products that are offered and licensed by Business Objects: 5,555,403; 6,247,008; 6,289,352; 6,490,593; 6,578,027; 6,768,986; 6,772,409; 6,831,668; 6,882,998 and 7,139,766. Business Objects and the Business Objects logo, BusinessObjects, Crystal Reports, Crystal Xcelsius, Crystal Decisions, Intelligent Question, Desktop Intelligence, Crystal Enterprise, Crystal Analysis, Web Intelligence, RapidMarts, and BusinessQuery are trademarks or registered trademarks of Business Objects in the United States and/or other countries. All other names mentioned herein may be trademarks of their respective owners. Business Objects products in this release may contain redistributions of software licensed from third-party contributors. Some of these individual components may also be available under alternative licenses. A partial listing of third-party contributors that have requested or permitted acknowledgments, as well as required notices, can be found at: http://www.businessobjects.com/thirdparty

Third-party Contributors

Contents
Chapter 1 What's New in Crystal Reports 2008 5 Introduction..................................................................................................6 Advanced information visualization with Flash, Flex, and Xcelsius.......7 Improved end-user report viewing experience.......................................8 Enhanced report designer productivity...................................................8 New flexible deployment options............................................................9 Flexible application integration.............................................................10 What's different..........................................................................................11 Index 13

What's New in Crystal Reports 2008

Contents

What's New in Crystal Reports 2008

What's New in Crystal Reports 2008

What's New in Crystal Reports 2008 Introduction

Introduction
Creating and delivering information-rich reports with compelling visualization. Crystal Reports is an intuitive reporting solution that helps customers create flexible, feature-rich, and dependable reports, and tightly integrate them into both thick and thin client applications. The Crystal Reports solution consists of these features: Powerful report designer Report authors benefit from a complete set of layout and design controls to create highly formatted, interactive, and professional looking reports. Use the standalone designer, or the design tool integrated within Visual Studio, without leaving the development environment. Flexible application development Developers can leverage cross-platform support for both Java and .NET development technologies. HTML is generated directly by Crystal Reports, allowing developers to focus on application business logic, rather than tedious, time-intensive hand coding. Separation of application development and report design tasks allow developers to focus on application development, while the report authors can focus on report design. Report management and delivery Reports are easily previewed in HTML and published to the web for better business decisions at all levels of the organization. Reports can also be exported and repurposed to the electronic formats used by most end users, such as PDF, Excel, and RTF. IT can centralize the management of operational reporting while distributing the report authoring function out to the lines of business. New Crystal Reports 2008 provides advanced functionality to help reduce report proliferation and maintenance, increase visualization flexibility, and save time with high-productivity design features. The following is an overview of the new features in Crystal Reports 2008. Advanced information visualization with Flash, Flex, and Xcelsius on page 7 Improved end-user report viewing experience on page 8 Enhanced report designer productivity on page 8

What's New in Crystal Reports 2008

What's New in Crystal Reports 2008 Introduction

New flexible deployment options on page 9 Flexible application integration on page 10

Advanced information visualization with Flash, Flex, and Xcelsius

Note: Flash features are available for viewing only in the .NET Winform and

Java DHTML viewers.

Adobe Flash integration

A wide variety of flexible data presentation options are available through Flash. Flash (SWF) files can now be integrated into your report, and report data can be shared with the SWF via Flashvars. This feature enables the creation of compelling, interactive, and information-rich reports. The SWF files can be embedded in the report or linked via a website.
Xcelsius integration

Deliver professional-looking reports with powerful decision-making support. Import Xcelsius-generated SWF files into your reports and benefit from improved design-time integration and stunning visualizations. Enhance your reports with what-if analysis models that enable users to make important decisions dynamically, without leaving the report file.
Adobe Flex integration

Integrate your reports with operational workflows by embedding Adobe Flex (SWF) applications into your reports. Using Adobe Flex Builder, you can create any business-user UI that accesses report data and also integrates with external web services. Data in your report can be passed to the Flex application via Flashvars, making it easy to create flexible UI even when you don't have web-services access to your data. The Flex applications can do tasks like database write-back and can invoke operational workflows directly within Crystal Reports.

What's New in Crystal Reports 2008

What's New in Crystal Reports 2008 Introduction

Improved end-user report viewing experience

Interactive report viewing

Get more information out of your report. New on-report sorting, filtering, and report reformatting with the .NET Winform, Java DHTML and .NET Webform viewers let users explore information interactively without re-querying the database. New optional parameters enable complex, user-driven filtering scenarios. Users can answer more business questions with fewer, more flexible, reports thereby significantly reducing Developer and IT support.
Parameter Panel

The report designer and the .NET Winform, Java DHTML, and .NET Webform viewers now have a Parameter Panel that allows parameter values to be set without refreshing data. The report consumer can easily see the parameters used for a report on the panel, change them, and have the new values applied directly to the saved data.
Flexible pagination

New pagination features allow report designers to customize page size and easily control page breaking after N records/groups. A single report can combine portrait- and landscape-oriented pages, and the white space at the end of groups can be removed by compressing the page footers. These features improve the online report-consumption experience by making reports easier to read.

Enhanced report designer productivity

Powerful cross-tabs

Insert summary, variance, and any other custom calculation into a cross-tab row or column. Custom calculations makes cross-tabs more powerful than before and can be used in reports that benefit from a table structureespecially financial reports. The cross-tab table structure makes reports much faster to build and maintain. This feature also provides powerful

What's New in Crystal Reports 2008

What's New in Crystal Reports 2008 Introduction

benefits to cross-tab-based charts, because custom formulas in the cross-tab can be visualized directly in the charts.
Built-in barcode support

Generate barcodes with only a few clicks of the mouse by using the new "Turn To Barcode" function in the context menu. Easily convert fields to Code39 barcodes without coding and extra steps. Additional barcode fonts are available from third-party barcode vendors.
Enhanced designer features

Improved report designer productivity is provided with new features such as global formula search, duplicate formula, duplicate running total, auto-complete field names, and Find in Field Explorer.
Hyperlinking Wizard

The new Hyperlinking Wizard saves report designers valuable time by letting them automatically create the Crystal Reports formula to call a BusinessObjects Enterprise OpenDocument hyperlink.
Note: This feature is available only with a BusinessObjects Enterprise

Release 3 server environment.

New flexible deployment options

Save reports directly to crystalreports.com

Expand your deployment options with on-demand reporting capabilities when you open and save reports directly to crystalreports.com. This new integration allows you to manage and share your reports securely with no dependency on IT.
Improved XML exporting

Render reports in almost any industry-standard format. New XML export allows for faster and easier integration with your industry-specific business processes, without custom coding. The XSLT transformations are embedded into the report file and will be triggered by the report viewers when exporting

What's New in Crystal Reports 2008

What's New in Crystal Reports 2008 Introduction

to XML. XML exports can now be invoked from within the report viewers. This feature provides a powerful, flexible hook for transforming Crystal Reports data and integrating it into other applications.
Advanced report publishing

Also known as report bursting, this new advanced-publishing feature is a platform for the mass distribution of personalized content. Multiple reports can be created based on different data sources, combined into one desired file format (for example, PDF), loaded with personalized content, and then sent to a dynamic list of recipientsall in one action. The content can be archived, printed, or emailed in separate actions, or simultaneously. This feature makes scheduling much faster and easier, and provides the ability to conduct cost effective one-on-one marketing campaigns and other personalized high-volume reporting.
Note: This feature is available only with a BusinessObjects Enterprise

Release 3 server environment.

Flexible application integration

Integrated salesforce.com driver

Now you can build reports that refresh against live salesforce.com data. The included salesforce.com driver is optimized for reporting off salesforce.com to easily access complete customer data and turn it into actionable business information. Reports that use the salesforce.com driver can refresh their data also when deployed to crystalreports.com.
Enhanced Web Services data driver

Integration with various web services can be difficult and complex due to a wide variety of implementation types. The new data driver offers additional web access to Web Services by providing support for RPC encoding of SOAP messages, SSL-secured Web Servers, as well as working compatibility with the WS-Security standard. It adapts to custom logon requirements such as email address or user/password.

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What's New in Crystal Reports 2008

What's New in Crystal Reports 2008 What's different

.NET report-modification SDK now included

The Report Application Server SDK is now available to users of the CR.NET API without running a RAS server. Report modification such as changing/adding/removing database providers, adding/removing/creating report objects, parameters, formulas, and sections can be achieved by accessing the RAS SDK through the CR .NET SDK.

What's different
In an effort to improve the Crystal Reports design experience, certain components of Crystal Reports 2008 have been changed. This section outlines some of the important changes.
Report samples and sample database

To reduce download time, report samples and the Xtreme sample database are now accessed through separate downloads on the Start Page of Crystal Reports 2008.
.NET Developer SDK documentation, Merge Modules, and MSI files

.NET Developer documentation, merge modules, and MSI files are now accessed through separate downloads on the Start Page of Crystal Reports 2008.
Report Developer Component (RDC)

The RDC is unsupported in Crystal Reports 2008. Developers wishing to use Crystal Reports in a COM application should use Crystal Reports XI Release 2. The ActiveX viewer remains a fully supported component of Crystal Reports 2008.
Advanced DHTML viewers

The Advanced DHTML viewers have been removed from Crystal Reports 2008 because the improvements to the DHTML viewers make these additional viewers unnecessary.

What's New in Crystal Reports 2008

11

What's New in Crystal Reports 2008 What's different

Java Reporting Component (JRC) availability and Java SDK documentation

Java developers now receive the JRC and Java SDK documentation through the free Crystal Reports for Eclipse download. This product will be updated on a separate schedule from Crystal Reports. Visit the start page in Crystal Reports 2008 for more information on updates to Crystal Reports for Eclipse.

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What's New in Crystal Reports 2008

Index
A
application integration 10 Parameter Panel 8 publishing reports 9

D
deploying reports 9 designing reports 8

R
reports deploying 9 designing 8 paginating 8 publishing 9 viewing 8

F
Flash 7 Flex 7

V
viewing reports 8

I
information visualization 7

X
Xcelsius 7

P
paginating reports 8

What's New in Crystal Reports 2008

13

Index

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What's New in Crystal Reports 2008