Automating Crystal Reports - for Tommy

[ambarnes]

Tommy,

I noticed in one of your last posts that you mentioned your company uses Crystal Reports to update its reports like every hour or so to a web site.

Could you give us an example of some of the coding/methods you use to automate this? I've finally gotten Crystal 8.5 to interface with our production server (4.0.10.2) and with our development (5.0.1.3) and pull down data - no fancy graphs yet though

[tommy]

I don't have the exact details but I can give You an overview.

We run 3 reports - now 3 times an hour - one that extracts calls, one that extracts problems and one that extracts screlation records.

The reports are exported as csv files. Once they have run they are sent via FTP to our DB2 server. Here a script runs importing the data into DB2.

Some time next year we will use connect.it instead which is better and more efficient.

With CR we can't go lower than 20 minutes between reports. So all updates are delayed from 20 to 40 minutes before they can be seen on the web but we want it available within few minutes.