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Crystal Reporting

 

Overview

The OCS applications have been interfaced to crystal reports as a reporting engine. This will allow much better reporting from the OCS applications including the use of color, graphics and graphing. Customers will also be able to alter the reports as required.

Most new reports created for OCS will be done using Crystal Reports.

NOTE: The customer does not need to purchase crystal reports as the run time engine is embedded in the OCS Client.
 

Printing/Processing Location

Reports will generally be processed by a server defined as the crystal reporting service. (This is achieved by installing the OCS client as a service. See knowledge base article OCS Client on how to set this up). This will free up the users terminal while the printing/processing is taking place and can offload the processing to a more powerful machines. This also means that printers do not need to be set up on the client.
 

Printer Setup

The printers are defined in the OpenMenu printer definition screen. The windows printer device name must be entered in the windows queue field. The exact device name is dependant on the printer driver being used but is usually in the \\<printer server>\<printer> . 

This printer device must be set up on the report processing server (for the user account that the OCS service is running under) and any client that will print directly to it from the client (see sections below for cases where this occurs).
 

Terminal Printing

When reports are printed to the terminal they are processed on the client and shown in a report viewer on the screen. The client must have 1 default printer defined for this to work as the report is displayed as it would be printed (WYSIWYG). The user can then use the report viewer to view the report and optionally print, email or save the report to file. NOTE: Any reports printed in this manner do not require the printer to be setup in OpenMenu.
 

Client Side Printers

Any printer in OpenMenu may be defined as a client printer. This forces the printer to be printed from the client. In this case the printers device name must be setup on the client.

This will allow printers only available on the client to be setup such as printers physically plugged into the client and special client only print devices such as Acrobat distiller, PDF maker and printing to file.
 

Forcing reports to be printed at the Client

A report can be forced to be printed at the client by putting an entry in the Build Professional ini/.todayrc file. The setting must be placed in the [TODAY Environment] section:

ClientReport<ReportName>

Where <ReportName> is the name of the report as shown in the OCS Crystal Reports section below.

In this case the printers device name must be setup on the client.

This can be used to force certain reports to the client where the report is required immediately and you do not wish for it to queue at the report processing server.
 

Command Line Processes and Background Processing

When reports are processed in the background or via a command line process (such as a report scheduled by cron) then the report cannot be processed and the client. The report will then be forced to print use the report processing server. It is important that a client side printer or report that is forced to the client not be used in these cases as the report may not be produced.