Saving Reports to Crystal Enterprise

Crystal Reports can interface directly with Crystal Enterprise to allow report developers to save their finished reports into the system. The same functionality can also allow report developers to open existing reports and make modifications to them. Note that your administrator must have had granted you access in order to acomplish tasks such as these.

System Administrators: Please read the special note at the end of this tutorial.

This tutorial assumes a report already has been opened and is ready to be saved to Crystal Enterprise.

1. Select File, Save As from the main menu (just as you normally would when saving a report to the hard drive):
   
   
   
2. Note on the Save As dialog has several options; Histry, Desktop, My Documents, Favorites, Web Folders and Enterprise Folders. Click on Enterprise Folders.
   
   
   
3. Crystal will now prompt you for the information in needs to connect to an Enterprise Server.
   
   Logon Using is the type of authentication utilized by your Crystal Enterprise Installation, Options include; Enterprise, Windows NT and LDAP. Contact your system administrator for which you should choose, note that if you use the same username for Crystal Enterprise as you use for logging into your Windows machine in the morning its likely that Windows NT should be chosen here.
   
   Username is the username assigned to you by the system administrator.
   
   Password is either assigned to you by the system administrator or set by you, if you have forgotten it you must contact your system administrator.
   
   APS is the name assigned to the Crystal Enterpise installation that you wish to save your report to, if you do not know this then contact your system administrator.
   
   
   
4. After logging in to Crystal Enterprise a "file explorer" will appear - this explorer functions in an identical manner as does a normal file explorer. The only difference is that you are viewing files and folders within the Crystal Enterprise System and any changes made will be identically reflected in the system. Caution is advised since the reports and folders seen here are often utilized by users and may be running on a schedule. Chaning reports here with adequate testing and safeguards can result in users not having access to reports necessary for their job function.
   
   

Note to System Administrators

This functionality can be extremely powerful in that it allows direct access to reports and allows report developers to make changes to them. However, it should also be noted that this can be extremely dangerous if appropriate quality control measures are not in place. It is recommended that developers not have direct access to production reports unless abolutly necessary since changes can and do effect report settings such as ODBC passwords. Instead grant developers access to folders labeled; Review, Development, Test or similar terms. Allow the developers the ability to make changes to these reports and then have quality control specialists or administrators charged with the task of propogating tested reports to production. Taking these measures will help avoid uneccessary conflicts with report users when a report fails to operate as it had previously.