Datasheet

Reports that have been published to the Crystal Enterprise framework can be accessed directly from
within Visual Studio .NET and integrated into your application.
In addition to providing a scalable, multi-tier back end for reporting applications, Crystal Enterprise also
has its own security layer (which can use Windows NT authentication, LDAP, and so on), internal struc-
tures (folders, objects, and rights), and scheduling engine, as well as distribution capabilities that can be
used to build complex reporting applications without have to reinvent a solutions architecture just for
reporting.
For example, if you needed to create an application that generates a report every week in PDF format
and sends it as an e-mail attachment to 10 different users, you could create that functionality within your
own application or you could use the inherent scheduling and distribution capabilities within Crystal
Enterprise to make a handful of API calls to do this for you.
Crystal Enterprise includes .NET assemblies that give you quick access to all of the properties, methods,
and events required to work with the Crystal Enterprise framework. Leveraging the functionality that is
included by default with Crystal Enterprise, you can quickly create robust reporting applications in a
fraction of the time it would take you to code these features by hand in your own custom application.
Another key area where Crystal Enterprise earns its money is with its clustering technology and multiple-
server architecture; imagine in our earlier example that there are now 10 reports that go to 100 different
people each day with a copy of the report and a link back to where they can view and search the live
report.
The clustering within Crystal Enterprise ensures that these jobs get run regardless of what servers are up
or down, and the distributed architecture means that you can add multiple servers to share the process-
ing workload, including servers tasked specifically to run scheduled reports and process on-demand
requests.
Although the cost of Crystal Enterprise may be off-putting to some developers, its integration with
Crystal Reports .NET and its distributed architecture — which is beyond the scope of this book — will
ensure that you have the scalability you need when your reporting application that serves 10 suddenly
needs to serve 10,000.
Report Architecture
When you look at Crystal Reports .NET, one of the immediate differences between this version and
previous incarnations of the product is its ability to create multi-tier reporting applications. In the past,
most Windows applications used a two-tier approach with Crystal Reports, where reports ran on the
local machine on which the application was installed.
With the introduction of Crystal Server for version 4.0 of Crystal Reports, a first attempt was made at
developing a client-server version of Crystal Reports; but it wasn’t until 1994, when Seagate Software
acquired Crystal Reports and the corporate scheduling product Ashwin— which could be used to sched-
ule programs processes and so on — was introduced, that multi-tier report applications became a reality.
The combination of the two products was first introduced in 1995 as Crystal Info and later renamed
Seagate Info. Through the Seagate Info SDK, an additional processing tier was introduced to developers,
with a server-based architecture that allowed reports to be run on a separate server and then returned to
the client.
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