Crystal Reports

Description

Crystal Reports is a popular tool for building reports that take some number of parameters, pull data from some data source, and display that data in a user-defined manner.

In ITrack

Everything that gets printed by ITrack is a Crystal report. For every different page that you can print out of ITrack, a report has been built that pulls the data from the MySQL server, compiles it, and sends it to the printer.

Difficulties

Crystal is a bitch.

Different versions of Crystal (both the run-time DLLs and the report editor) are plagued with a wide variety of bugs and quirks. If there is any difference between what some aspect of Crystal (built into ITrack, or just within the various run-time DLLs), it will give useless errors and fail.

This problem is exacerbated by the fact that Crystal Reports is used by a wide variety of applications which are all generally counting on a specific version of Crystal (which just happens to be slightly different from everyone else). Each of these applications generally installs it's preferred version of Crystal, which will as often as not fuck up Crystal on that computer for the other applications that use it.

Making it Work

In current versions of ITrack, we've had good luck on virtually all the computers we've run across as long as we install the Crystal 11 Installer Package that we found, and make sure that the version of craxdrt.dll that we compile the software with is in the ITrack directory.

This should all be set up by any current ITrack installers, though files could of course be messed up when other applications that use Crystal are installed.