Crystal Reports XI Official Guide

The most flexible approach to integrating BusinessObjects Enterprise XI (or its sister product, Crystal Reports Server) is to use a software development kit (SDK) for COM, .NET, or Java. The InfoView portal and portions of the Central Management Console (CMC) are built using these SDKs. By implication, the SDKs are full-featured, and this chapter is devoted to understanding them. The Unified Web Services, described in Chapter 32, "Using the Web Service's SDK," is also very useful especially where CORBA network connectivity is not possible. However, the Web Services SDK is not full-featured.

Before continuing down the code-from-scratch/samples road, you might want to skip ahead to Chapter 31, "Using the Web Components," and see if any of the approaches described there are sufficient for your project. They include the ability to view, create, and edit reports simply by calling URLs; integrating components visually using Java Server Faces (JSF); or simply deploying prebuilt catalog browsing and viewing portlets into Microsoft SharePoint, WebSphere Portal, or any other JSR-168compliant Java portal.

Before diving into the BusinessObjects Enterprise SDK, Table 30.1 enumerates each of the integration approaches and which platforms they support.

Table 30.2 shows the component integration approaches and the platforms they support.

In addition, you will want to determine the quickest and easiest way to provide the customized functionality you desire. The CMC is the 100% zero client web-based administration console that is provided out of the box with BusinessObjects Enterprise and Crystal Reports Server. This application is used in conjunction with each of the other products. Table 30.3 is a comparison matrix to help you determine what administrative functionality you may access with no custom coding.