Support of Coresuite Designer - External Report, Type: Crystal Reports

Table of Contents

I Introduction

II Important and Useful

1. HANA
2. SQL
3. Platform independent

III Related Documentation

Latest news

• 24.02.2022 - We delivered an improvement for Crystal Framework that is compatible with SAP Business One 10.0 FP 2111 in Coresuite Designer 7.60. In Coresuite Administration, you will get Designer compatible with SAP Business One 10.0 FP2111, if you need a new version of Designer for older SAP Business One 10.0 FPs, please download Designer from the section below.
  Please note that another breaking change related to Crystal Reports has been delivered with SAP Business One 10.0 FP 2111 and it affects direct PDF and Print functionalities which are available from the toolbar of SAP Business One. When you click on PDF and Print icons, the action will fail with error message "Coresuite Designer: External report error. Failed to open the connection.". For now, as a workaround to print or export layouts as PDFs, use appropriate functionalities directly from the Preview form. We plan to deliver a change for these functionalities with Designer 7.65.
• 25.01.2022 - With SAP Business One 10.0 FP 2111, SAP delivered some breaking changes and External Crystal Reports do not work in Coresuite Designer anymore. We reported the ticket to SAP and we are communicating with them in order to resolve this issue as soon as possible. 

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I Introduction (Back to Table of Contents)

Due to various inconsistencies in SAP documentation/SAP Notes and dependent Crystal Reports libraries, updating our code to support our Coresuite Designer - External Reports for Crystal reports proved to be a major challenge.
The problem started with the 64-bit SAP Business One client application for SAP Business One 9.1/9.2/9.3 and continued with the support of the multi-tenant connection (DB platform HANA 1.0 vs HANA 2.0 ) as well as security enhancements in SAP Business One 10.0.
It took several SAP incidents to clarify the required details to finally be in the position to update our code successfully. We also managed to get SAP to update their official documentation accordingly. We are now happy to announce that with the release of Coresuite Designer 7.45, we can once again support our External Reports with Crystal Reports without having to apply individual workarounds.

II Important and Useful (Back to Table of Contents)

A. HANA (Back to Table of Contents)

• Initially, we were using the HDBODBC driver in our code but during our tests, we then found that the data displayed did not match the data in the database. It appeared that the connection had been automatically established to a different database than the one defined.
  Due to this, we now use the B1CRHPROXY driver. This driver needs to be installed on the machine(s) from where you print/preview with your Coresuite Designer External Report, Type: Crystal Reports layouts. (valid for SAP Business One 10.0, HANA).
• You can create your layouts in Crystal Designer using both, HDBODBC32 and B1CRHPROXY32 drivers. Coresuite Designer automatically updates the connection string related information in the report and its sub-reports and redirects to the B1CRHPROXY driver, 64-bit (valid for SAP Business One 10.0, HANA).

B. SQL (Back to Table of Contents)

• For SAP Business One 10.0, Coresuite Designer automatically updates the connection string related information in the report and its sub-reports and redirects to the SQL Server Native Client 11.0 driver which can be downloaded from here.
  This driver needs to be installed manually as it is no longer required by the SAP Business One client application itself. For previous SAP Business One versions, no additional/special driver is required as the necessary one is automatically installed with the SAP Business One client application in the first place.

C. Platform independent (Back to Table of Contents)

• Coresuite Designer code needs to be compiled with references to very specific Crystal Reports libraries and almost each SAP Business One version does have its very own specific Crystal Reports libraries.
  The connection to a DB might fail with the message "Crystal decision", etc. when trying to print/preview in SAP Business One versions other than mentioned below.
• We successfully tested Coresuite Designer - External Report, Type: Crystal Reports layouts on SAP Business One 9.3 PL10 - PL14 (both 32-bit and 64-bit) and SAP Business One 10.0 FP 2011 - FP 2105.
• Occasionally, when trying to display the layout for the first time, only a blank form without data opens. If this happens, simply close the form and reopen the preview/restart the print again. This is an SAP Business One/Crystal Reports issue for which we have currently no solution or other workaround.
• Crystal Reports appears to be quite sensitive and you might encounter various issues when using both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of SAP Business One on the same machine.
  Also corruptions of Crystal Reports (runtime) installations are quite common.
  In those cases, we recommend reinstalling Crystal Reports (runtime) according to the SAP documentation on the affected machine(s).
• Crystal Designer layouts are not backward compatible.
  Layouts created with e.g. Crystal Designer version CR2016 SP8 cannot be used via 3rd party add-ons with SAP Business One versions which are not compatible with Crystal Designer CR2016 SP8.

III Related Documentation (Back to Table of Contents)

2329487 - Crystal Reports for SAP Business One Matrix
2932941 - How To Connect to the Database From Crystal Reports Designer With HANA multitenant database containers (MDC)
2900925 - You Can Only Use the B1CRHPROXY32 and HDBODBC32 Drivers When You Are Connecting to the ODBC Data Source From Crystal Reports Designer
2845037 - Reinstalling SAP Crystal Reports and Associated SAP Business One Components
2966187 - Troubleshooting Crystal Reports API Issues in SAP Business One Landscape

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