Summary Information

Crystal Reports allows you to enter summary information in regards to your report, this will basically serve as Metadata. The data entered here is useful to other users since they will be able to open the report and view this summary information. More importantly though is if reports are utilized within Crystal Enterprise. Crystal Enterprise can access this summary information for display and search purposes.

1) To define Summary information Select File -> Summary Info from the main menu:

 

2) A dialog box will be desplayed which will allow you to enter information such as Author, Keywords, Comments, Title, Subject, Template and if a Preview Picture should be created. See dialog box and field descriptions below.

 

Author

Used to define the name(s) of the report author(s), useful for other developers if questions arise to the reports design/implementation.

Keywords

Keywords will help identify the content of the report, these keywords will also be searchable from Crystal Enterprise if this report is uploaded ot it.

Comments

Comments can be used to describe the content of the report, the reason for the report's creation, and so on. Note it is not a good idea to put searchable keywords (for use by Crystal Enterprise) here since this field is not indexed and search times will be slow. Use the Keywords entry provided for these purposes.

Note: If you include these comments on a report using the Special Field called Report Comments, only the first 256 characters will be displayed.

Title

A title entered here can be added to the report by using the Special Field called Report Title.

Subject

Overall subject of your report.

Template

If you created the report by using another report as a template, type the name of that template here.

Save preview picture

Select this check box if you'd like to create a picture of the first page of the report so you can see it when selecting a report in the Open dialog box. Checking this box is a good idea if you are going to upload the report into Crystal Enterprise, the preview picture will be used to generate the thumbnail for display purposes.

3) Enter information as shown below and click OK

4) Thats it all information entered will now be viewable by other users of this report and also be accessible to Crystal Enterprise.