Development of Crystal Reports

Crystal Reports can be used in two different ways in IFS Applications.

1. As Quick Reports, to be able to present data in more sophisticated way than ordinary plain SQL statement Quick Reports.
2. As a layout format for operational reports (invoices, order confirmations and that type of documents), instead of using Report Designer layouts.

Since these two different usages of Crystal Reports doesn't have that much in common, each of these solutions are described separately.

• Using Crystal Reports as Quick Reports
• Using Crystal Reports Report Designer layouts for operational reports.

General Crystal Reports Q&A

Which version of Crystal Reports should be used with each IFS Applications version?

Each IFS Applications version (down to a service pack level) come with a certain version of bundled Crystal Reports runtime files. This means that:

1. The particular IFS Apps version is able to run Crystal Reports developed with that version and older Crystal Report versions (see below Q&A regarding backward compatibility). Reports developed using newer versions of Crystal Reports than the bundled runtime is generally not supported.
2. There's one preferred version of Crystal Reports for each particular version of IFS Applications. If the bundled runtime is Crystal Reports 2011, the preferred Crystal Reports version for report development is Crystal Reports 2011.

The following versions of the Crystal Reports runtime are bundled in each IFS Applications version:

Note: From IFS APPS 8 SP2 the bundle has moved from FNDBAS to a new component called CRYSTL and is therefore not automatically included.

Can I have multiple crystal runtime versions inside the same machine?

Crystal Reports does not support multiple versions of their design tool or runtime to be installed simultaneously and therefore nor does IFS Applications. As long as the IFS Applications versions you want to coexist on the same machine use the same Crystal Reports runtime version there's no problem installing multiple version. See the information above regarding bundled runtime version in each version to see what version combinations are legal and which are not.

Is Crystal Reports and the IFS integration backward compatible?

This question might not be as straight forward as it seems. User needs to understand how the IFS integration works, as well as SAP (the developers of Crystal Reports) view on backward compatibility.
Crystal Reports 2011 is backward compatible, meaning it can open and view reports developed with earlier versions of Crystal Reports.
The IFS integration basically relies on the backward compatibility of Crystal Reports, so the integration is also able to run reports developed with earlier versions of Crystal Reports.
Just because Crystal Reports and the integration is backward compatible this does not mean it's forward compatible. A report developed or saved using a newer version of Crystal Reports compared to the runtime files bundled with the IFS Applications version can not be expected to work in that older version of IFS Applications.

What edition of Crystal Reports 2011 (Standard, Professional, Developer or Server) should we or the customer buy to do report basic development and/or support report developers for IFS Application 8?

For development and support you would need at least the "Professional Edition". There’s no need what so ever to go for the Server edition unless you’re planning to develop and run some completely different Crystal integration than the one provided by IFS Technology.
Ultimately, what edition to go for needs to be decided on a case by case basis, possibly after discussion with a Crystal vendor's sales representative. The Developer Edition has been used and proved to work well within the IFS Technology team. The Professional Edition have been used in several IFS regions and by customers. The Standard Edition has not been tested according to our knowledge and information we’ve received indicates that it will not work with the type of data sources used by the IFS specific reports (“Oracle Server”). This is unverified by R&D / IFS Technology, though.

Why dose it takes a long time to process or execute a Crystal Report from IEE or Web Client?

There are some known design-time factors that might affect performance of processing or executing a Info Service Report or Quick Report of type Crystal Report. Have a look at this link for more information.