Crystal Reports 10: The Complete Reference

Overview

As you work with a database reporting or querying tool, such as Crystal Reports, you often find yourself facing two tasks : learning the ins and outs of the reporting or query tool itself, and learning the underlying database that you need to report or query against. While there are usually resources (such as this book) available to help you learn the reporting or querying tool, there are probably not nearly as many comprehensive sources for information on your particular database.

Complex database designs are not unusual. It s not uncommon to encounter databases that consist of hundreds of different tables, or tables that contain 100 or more fields. Adding to this difficulty are database designers who may attempt to ensure job security by creating table and field names that are far from intuitive. In these situations, you are either forced to look for comprehensive database documentation (which may or may not exist), or to just experiment in a haphazard manner, eventually discovering proper database table and field requirements by hook or crook.

One tool that can greatly reduce the complexity of direct database access is a dictionary or meta data tool that organizes the core database table and field structure into a much simpler and easy-to-understand organization. This middle layer can be set up to include only relevant tables, pre-join tables on their proper fields, expose only desired fields from the database, store commonly used formulas, and apply database row and column security to individual report designers and viewers to provide access to only data fields and records that they are permitted to see.

The new Crystal 10 Business Views product is the Business Objects answer to this middle- layer requirement. While previous versions of Crystal Reports were able to work with the Crystal Dictionaries tool, and the original report distribution system called Crystal Info included a similar tool called Info Views; Business Views provides a new, from-the-ground-up approach to simplifying database organization for report designers.