Seagate Crystal Reports 8 delivers a number of new features and enhancements, including many recommended by our customers. In particular, this section introduces: 

• High Performance Web Reporting
• Performance Enhancements
• Application Development for Windows and Web
• Integration with Microsoft Office
• Usability and General Enhancements

To find out which features are contained in each edition of Seagate Crystal Reports 8, refer to the features table at the bottom of the page

High Performance Web Reporting 

Web Component Server

High performance multi-threaded architecture provides multiple users with faster report viewing, enhanced presentation quality and better overall performance.  Page-on-demand report access enables you to download only the specific report pages you want to see, which improves response times, and reduces Web traffic. Supports many existing Web infrastructures such as Microsoft, Netscape, Lotus and CGI-based web servers.

* 5-concurrent user licenses included in Seagate Crystal Reports

Web Report Viewers

• New DHTML report viewer provides presentation-quality reports via compatible web browsers without downloading any software onto the client machine.    
• New Netscape Plug-in allows the Report Viewer for ActiveX to be used within a Netscape browser.  
• Enhanced Report Viewer for Java has been updated to use Sun’s Java 2.0 runtime environment and now provides improved printer support.
• Report Viewer for ActiveX now supports copying and pasting of text from the viewer into other applications. 

Report viewers now support progressive display of report sections for faster viewing over the Web, even as the report is processing. 

Hyperlinks

Use hyperlinks to link to related documents including files, e-mail addresses, web sites or other Crystal reports all from within your report. They can be associated with most report objects including text, pictures, database and formula fields. Hyperlinks are executed by simply clicking on a linked object in any viewer. Full URL support is provided for hypertext, file, mail and news hyperlinks. 

Web Folders

If you are running Microsoft Windows 9x, Windows NT with Microsoft Office 2000, or Windows 2000, you can store, update, and save reports directly to a web folder on a web server. You no longer have to download reports, edit them locally, and upload them to the web server.

Performance Enhancements

Report Processing Performance

Seagate Crystal Reports 8 features major improvements in report performance in all areas of processing. The smaller, multi-threaded Report Engine packs even more power with its streamlined size and increased capacity to process multiple, simultaneous jobs. 

You will see significant performance improvements when opening, refreshing, sorting, filtering and formatting. New support for placeholders virtually eliminates the wait time for viewing the first page of reports distributed on the Web.

When loading reports with saved data, display of the first page is very fast due to RPT format changes that enable the decompression of batches of the saved data on demand, instead of all at once. 

Page Generation

Most reports containing summaries, charts, maps and OLAP grids are now generated with one pass of all the records. Opening reports with large group trees, totaller, images or high total page counts is also significantly faster.

SQL Performance

Support for SQL database servers has been improved with more operations performed on the server for faster report processing and better use of network resources. More SQL is now processed on compatible database servers. Select Distinct for selecting unique records returns less data from the database resulting in better overall processing performance. New support for asynchronous communications allows you to halt SQL statements on the database server.

File Storage

The RPT file format has been improved to create smaller files with faster decompression and more efficient storage of complex reports containing saved data.      

Application Development for Windows and Web

Enhanced Report Designer Component (RDC)

Designed for Microsoft Visual Studio and other COM-based development environments, the RDC* provides the highest level of reporting flexibility of any Crystal Reports development components. The feature-rich RDC gives developers more control over report layout and formatting. New runtime report creation functions** enable reports to be created dynamically within your application…either in code or via a runtime report creation wizard. For added flexibility, the RDC offers the ability to use unbound fields to create complete reports without depending on an existing database connection.

*    Other developer tools for integrating reports into applications such as the Automation Server (OLE) interface, Crystal Report Print Engine API, ActiveX (OCX/OLE) Control, and Delphi VCL Control are included in the Developer Edition. These tools ensure backward compatibility for developers as they transition to the RDC. They are available in 32-bit technology only and do not include enhancements which have been made to the RDC in Seagate Crystal Reports 8. 

Enhanced ASP Server

The ASP server has been redesigned to use the Report Designer Component runtime providing more consistency for VB developers. It can now take advantage of various performance improvements such as placeholder support for page-on-demand. Visual InterDev developers can now leverage the scalable, high performance reporting capabilities of Seagate Crystal Reports in their web projects.

Report Integration Controls

Microsoft Visual InterDev 6.0 developers can write ASP applications with integrated Crystal reports using the same Report Designer Component (RDC) object model used in Win 32 applications.    

Web developers using Microsoft Visual InterDev 6.0 can use the new Report Integration Controls to write web applications and generate Seagate Crystal Reports hosted either on a Web Report Server or an ASP Server. End users of these applications can then view reports using a browser-based Report Viewer.

Integration with Microsoft Office

Add-ins for Microsoft^® Excel / Access

Provides a simple way for Microsoft Office 97 and 2000 users to easily create reports within familiar Excel or Access environments. The appropriate Add-in is added to the "Tools" menu and is then available any time Access or Excel is run. Simply select the data for the report and the Report Expert steps you through the process of creating a simple report. Simply click refresh to update any changes. The resulting report can be saved or opened in Seagate Analysis or Seagate Crystal Reports for viewing and editing.

Export

Exporting of reports to Word, Excel and RTF has been improved to make integrating existing reports into Office documents as seamless as possible.

OLE DB Support

Seagate Crystal Reports 8 supports OLE DB for easy connection to data stored in SQL Server and other data sources supporting this standard.

User Interface Improvements

The user interface of components such as the toolbars and the new Data Explorer offer a familiar Microsoft Office look-and-feel to reduce the learning curve for first time users.

Usability and General Enhancements

Report Designer

The Report Designer interface offers much better control over the positioning of report objects with the ability to move, align, resize, copy and paste multiple objects and new alignment and ruler options. This is especially useful for designing reports for use with printed forms.

Enhanced Formula Language

The Formula Language has been enhanced with a new syntax called Basic syntax, which is a Microsoft Visual Basic^®-like language. You can create formulas using either Crystal or Basic-like syntax. Almost any formula written with one can be created with the other and reports can contain both formula languages. Seagate Crystal Reports 8 includes over 60 new functions, operators and control structures including support for case statements, looping and dynamic arrays.

Data Explorer

Connecting to data is faster and easier with a graphical, Explorer-like interface for selecting data sources. Users can choose from available drivers, sorted by connection type, choose connections they have previously used (History) or saved (Favorites) or create new connections via ODBC or OLE DB.

DHTML File Export

File export has been enhanced to provide better preservation of formatting.  New support for DHTML (HTML 4.0) file format enables more accurate rendering of the report and offline viewing, storage or distribution.

Preformatted Text Import

Text objects or report fields can be optionally specified as preformatted RTF or HTML text. This allows Seagate Crystal Reports 8 to interpret any embedded formatting tags and display the text appropriately within the formatting capabilities of Seagate Crystal Reports. Formatted text can be pasted into a report or read from a database field.

OLAP / Cross-tab Reporting

The OLAP / Cross-tabs Report Expert has been enhanced to provide 18 predefined grid styles and more control over grid layout, formatting, mapping and charting, including the ability to conditionally format individual rows or columns. Filtering, grouping and ordering of OLAP dimensions in the Expert is now easier and more flexible.

Advanced Grouping and Summarizing

You can now use hierarchical grouping to arrange data in a report to show hierarchical relationships in your data. To better describe a group, use a database field name or Group Name formula to specify the text that appears in the Group Header. Choose whether to insert a summary or subtotal on every group, or specify the field to summarize or subtotal. You can specify this choice without first selecting a field. View the percentage of one group’s involvement in a larger group. For example, use the Percentage Summary field to show the percentage of sales in each city of a country based on the total sales of the country.

Text Formatting

Text formatting has been expanded to include support for fractional font sizes, conditional font sizes, character and line spacing, indentation, and rotation. Borders have been enhanced to support rounded edges, circular and oval borders. You can also choose from more date, time and date-time formats.

Charting

The Charting Expert has been enhanced to provide more control over chart and legend formatting, charting on running totals and better support for special graph types like bubble charts. Zooming is now supported in the Analyzer, Preview and drill-down tabs. Tool tips display more detailed information for graph data.

Geographic Mapping

In the Analyzer tab, a new optional map lens makes navigating maps at high zoom levels easier and provides a fast way to navigate within a map. Mismatches between map place names and database names can now be resolved in a similar manner to field mapping. Tool tips now display more detailed information about values for map regions. You can also create maps based on unique geographic groups.

Image Format Support

Seagate Crystal Reports now supports more image formats in reports including BMP, JPEG, PICT, PNG, TIFF and Targa pictures.

Saving Reports

Auto saving is now supported and reports can be saved with a visual preview "snapshot" of the first page.

Lotus Notes Native Driver

New native driver eliminates need to configure Lotus Notes SQL driver on every desktop.

Version 7 File Format 

Seagate Crystal Reports files can be saved or exported in Version 7 file format to make distributing reports to Version 7 users easier. Seagate Crystal Reports 8 features are not supported in the Version 7 files.

Features Table

D=Developer Edition 
P=Professional Edition
S=Standard Edition