Why Implement the Crystal Repository?

Imagine the real-life situation where an organization has thousands of Crystal reports, some of which have a copyright notice on the bottom of each page. The legal department decides it wants to change the verbiage on this copyright notice. The administrator faces three problems: which reports have this notice, how to make this change in a timely fashion, and how to effectively make these types of changes in the future.

Without the repository the administrator would have the unfortunate task of checking each individual desktop and any shared drives to locate the reports. Each report would have to be checked for the copyright notice and the change made.

This is the exact problem that the Crystal Repository will resolve. The report developers would publish the report to Crystal Enterprise, which would control where the reports are stored and provide security as to who can see which reports. The publishing process is explained in Chapter 23, "Using Crystal Enterprise with Web Desktop." The administrator could then create, using the Crystal Report Designer, a Text object with the correct copyright notice. This object is saved in the Crystal Repository. These managed reports could then be opened in Crystal Reports and the old copyright notice replaced by the newer one.

Should the organization want to make changes at a later date to the notice or any other shared objects, there are utilities that the administrator would run that would cycle through the reports and update all reports with the new object. For instance, the Publishing Wizard provides the facility of updating repository objects, as does the Crystal Management Console.