Clubbing the Crystal Dodo

Crystal Reports is a fat stupid dodo. With few natural predators, it's been staggering around the business reporting islands for 10 versions now, only getting fatter and stupider.

With Reporting Services, Microsoft have finally gotten serious about clubbing the Crystal Dodo into extinction.

Absolutely agreed, currently writing 6 crystal reports and drives me nuts just thinking about Crystal.

Reporting services rocks, once they get native printing in there then will start converting until then can't be bothered exporting to print.

Crystal used to be an alright product, but it was never great. It's main thing was that it was easy to use and that's about it. With the VS.NET Edition, it was a step backward. "Strongly Typed Reports" were touted as a big new feature. Three words So ******* What come to mind as much more appropriate.

I'm with you on every count there.

Crystal Reports sucks, blows, licks, eats (and everything else) and should be shot to death. I wonder what kind of a geek came up with crap that takes donkey's years (read more than 15 minutes) to load data from just seven data tables. Anything remotely complicated won't work. There is no ability to add complicated SQL statements in. There is virtually no ability to add in complicated formulas and debugging takes years, if not decades.

Clubbing the dodo, my arse. Dodo ain't that huge and cumbersome (not to mention SLOOOOOOOOOOOWW and garbage producing)....Clubbing the brontosaraus (check spelling) is more like it.

UGH! When will this particular dinosaur die?

Crystal is unbelievable for how closely it comes to providing a usable system for input-parameters, but fails miserably. WTF can't you specify optional parameters? In other words, if a developer adds a report parameter, why can't there be a checkbox that would make that parameter optional so the user isn't REQUIRED to select an item. This is infuriating!!!? CHECK FOR "NOT SELECTED" AND FREAKING IGNORE THE PARAMETER. HOW MUCH HEADACHE WOULD THAT SAVE!!! It's like a creul, creul joke. Crystal SUCKS monkey T1Ts.

Crystal help documentation and support. If you want to talk about things that sucks try those two in XI. Programmers of the world should be given the power to collect that kind of garbage and tell the managers who buy them what they can do with them. I do not think that pogrammer ever should recommend Crystal. I always written my own an so far they worked. I made lots of enemies loang the way, but who cares it is better than working with "Crap Reports".

Yes, I could think of a LOT of things to do with Crystal OTHER than "program" in it (is such a thing as programming possible with Crystal????)....

...a programmer's worst nightmare, it is. Especially when one gets those strange DLL errors upon running a report with NO explanation whatsoever.....

:angry:

In a moment of frustration, I entered "Crystal Reports Sucks" into Google.

Wow! I am not alone. 105 hits, and much useful information. I feel better.

I have purchased CR9 and am working with a trial of XI because of a serious (my opinion) bug in v9. Today, I learn that this is a known issue, with a "Knowledge Base" article at http://support.businessobjects.com/library/kbase/articles/c2011056.asp

Well, the bug is still there - in versions 8, 8.5, 9, 10 and 11. Is EVERYBODY having a problem with this one? "Object Size and Position" rarely works correctly. You enter your desired parameters to position an object, and Crystal almost always moves it over 1 pixel. If often takes 20 or 30 tries to get it right, and this consumes a very high percentage of my development time. The arrow keys, BTW, will usually move the object 2 pixels at a time, instead of 1. The workaround suggested in their KB article rarely works.

If they would only fix this one bug, I would be happier than a pig in s**t. I can't believe they havn't fixed it after so many versions. Has everybody noticed this one?

Roy - Houston Tx
Programming since 1967

CRYSTAL REPORTS SUCKS!!!

ALWAYS HAS, ALWAYS WILL!!

It's too funny that the post before mine he says, "In a moment of frustration, I entered 'Crystal Reports Sucks' into Google." That's exactly what I just did, which is how I arrived here. AG!! It's some sort of crime that this company got hooked in with Microsoft early on, as they have become the default PIECE OF CRAP for reporting. Trust me, I've been developing in VB since version 2 and it SUCKED HARD even back then!! Just the simplest niceties were neglected, and then their whole idiotic "what should we do??" regarding using sql usage just BLOWS! It's kind of hard to imagine how a company can continue for YEARS neglecting the most BASIC good qualities in a reporting package. The friggin' thing is not even INTUITIVE to use! As soon as I think I know everything that sucks about Crystal, I find ANOTHER thing that SUCKS!!! SUCKING WONDERS JUST NEVER CEASE!!!! Yet companies are "forced" to use the crap.

Thanks for listening.

Ha, well, been a while since I last posted on here.

I don't use that goddamned shit piece of software anymore....JOY!

My last employer made me use it. Thankfully I am not working any longer for them.

Ah, the joy of it all :grin: :grin:

cheers Froo, glad you've escape the gravity of planet crystal.

i'm using DevXpress.XtraReports a fair bit now (in windows forms applications) and they seem to do the trick quite nicely. A few missing features, but all up, i like em a lot.

lb

I also entered 'Crystal Reports Sucks' in google.

Because it does.

Even Access produces better reports, in 1/10th of the time. Too bad Access crashes all the time so we had to use SQl-Server and Crystal. Crystal is a piece of shit, waiting to be crushed by a better product.

I'm confident it will.

I installed Crystal XI today, told that it is a standard reporting environment and maybe my app should use it.

Ok, let's give it a try. First thing it did - overwrite LIBEAY32.DLL with version incompatible with other apps I use. Looked for problems on BO site, found issue. Ok, it happens, must think how to make both apps work. Then after couple of clicks Crystal crashed.

And then I started using it and after fifteen minutes of SLOW, SLOW work I decided to google for "Crystal Reports sucks". Thank you folks for sharing experiences with this HEAVY CRAP WITH PRETTY ICONS.

Use it? NO WAY and hope noone will force me. Bye, bye CR.

If you check on ComponentSource, Crystal Reports doesn't even appear in the top 500 but ActiveReports and XtraReports are both in the top 20.

I HOPE that people are FINALLY starting to wake up and stop buying that hunk of junk. I've heard that XI is better but still crap.

Yep, I did a search on Google for Crystal Reports Sucks - and I'm here and not alone!

Over the past 10 years I have been using Crystal Reports and I cringe at the thought of using it for reporting. As a developer, the poor documentation, examples and even the version numbers that the company produces are/is confusing and misleading.

Now my daughter is becoming a lawyer - So I asked her about suing Business Objects for all the grief and anxiety that this company and its marketing engine have put me and my customers through. She said that there could be grounds for a class action suit.

Some one should take on these pricks! and make them pay for the grief that they have put developers through.

Microsoft should ramp up their efforts and eliminate the B.O. company.

Crystal is a piece of crap. I am glad that i am not the only one to notice this.

Every time a new version comes out i check it out to see if by some off chance the product has become usable, start using and remember why it is completely rooted, and then immediately revert to using some other method of generating reports.

This has happened to me numerous times over the last 10 years.

Tim

Agreed. Crystal XI is leaps and bounds ahead of previous versions, but it's still not enough. And the interesting features (at least for web apps) are going to require Crystal Server. Ummm... no.

Yes, the size and position problem is still there-- damaging reports since 2002. I also love how it doesn't have anything like a "take these objects and space the rest of them like the first two" command.

Each and every time I use Crystal 10 for a reporting project, having dealt with all the "known" isues previously discovered, I find many many days wasted in resolving new issues. Crystal is a major headache EVERY time I have to use it. Never have I known such a convoluted, complex and bug-ridden piece of software. If you're budgeting man-days on a project involving Crystal Reports then make sure you at lease double your estimate. No, I'm not exaggerating.

THANK GOD THERE IS AN OUTLET DISGRUNTLED CRYSTAL REPORTS Users/Developers.

My biggest beef is their support which is not only mostly contracted to people in India but evidently they are bottom of the barrell of what India has to offer.

I spent two weeks on a critical issue for deployment because the idiots wouldn't listen to me. I asked them a key question from the start and should the have bothered to answer would have saved me two weeks of heartache. Instead they shoved some PDF in my face TWICE.

Only after I contacted someone in the U.S. about the issue did an American fellow tell me what the problem was in as little as 30 minutes.

I have since decided to move on to ActiveReports. I am going to convert all my customer's applications and move forward. Life is too short. Don't Screw around with Crystal.

Hehe, logging on to this thread again after almost six months or so - once I stopped using that piece of crap, I wanted to erase ALL thoughts of it from my mind (and was successful for the most part) ...

... Till I came upon this once more in my bookmarks.

I see the Crystal bashing still hasn't stopped, and RIGHTFULLY so!

"secret geek" - Cheers it is indeed! Yippee! Woo hoo! And great thread you got going on, please do maintain/archive it so we can send it to Crystal headquarters on XMAS eve :-).

"A Wells" - they get bottom of the barrel support in India since their product is so crappy that even someone working minimum wage would be loathe to provide support for it. Sort of like proudly proclaiming "I wrote a game in BASIC, I'm an IT guru"! Well, IT support doesn't equate to IT guru but you get my drift ;-)

i like the deserving anger directed towards this seventh circle of hell product. first off i do think that crystal xi is an ok product now, but i has so many damn fundamental flaws.

well i think ill just list my top grips with crystal.

1. wtf does it dump large ~cdx*.tmp files in windows/temp? unfortunately BO wont give this information away for free, and i'll be godamn if i am going to ask my boss to pay money to solve one of their fuxk ups

2. crystal handles null values very very very bad... for instance if u try to do a comparison on a null value then it is cast as an empty object. but the problem is that it is no longer a null from that point on. it stays an empty object. again wtf!

3. can i just "keep multiple groups together". it is a feature that is so intutive to any developer but is lost in the relm of crystal.

4. yes there are times when it is appropriate to put a sub report within a subreport. heres my nice scenario... crystal doesnt do dynamic grouping so therefore each kind of grouping order that could occur has to be represented within a subreport. well if the data branches below this (roomid is based on configid, and attributeid is based on configid, but roomid and attributeid have no relation to themselves) then the easiest way to branch this is, drum roll please, subreports for each branch.

5. you would think that after 11 godamn releases they would have made an extensive debugging tool. but no.

6. hot fixes... hahaha tried them but they also break the viewer.

well im done with my ranting

Expensive, hard to use, full of bugs.

Very slow, so you neeed to spend even more money to set up clustered servers etc...

die die die I hate this product

ethos,

Totally agree with all your points, but ESPECIALLY point #2!!

I remember a bunch of times when Crystal would bitch at me about null values ... that bitching also made it EXTREMELY hard for me to use "general" formulas as if one cell contained null values, the whole mess would creak to halt with an error. And HTF does one deal with fields that are null at present, but won't be in future?

Crystal developers and people who decide to use this must be thinking as clearly as a monkey on crack. Ok, so I got that off my chest ...

Anyway, I don't use Crystal anymore as I've stated, so I've sort off gotten over the nightmares that it gave me. Still do shudder when I read some of the experiences posted on here.

Here's to NO MORE CRYSTAL FOR ALL!!! :BEER:

Froo

PS: That being said, let the Crystal bashing commence anew. Damn piece of crap tortured me for damn near two and a half years, it deserves all the "accolades" it's getting on this forum.

Crystal Reports is a piece of ****!!! Who the MF came up with an idea like this?? Wot a lard ass **** up piece ****!!!!

I've got to go against the trend here - maybe I'm one of the unconverted "Crystal-Haters", but I actually like Crystal Reports.

However, that said, my only other experience with a Report Designer is the piece of c**p ComponentOne VS Reports. I don't know if anyone has used VS Reports before, but after losing my 5th report I had spent 4 hours building, because it crashed with an "Unspecified error", I had to change. In comparison, Crystal Reports is fantastic!!

So, you guys may all moan about Crystal, but try out VS Reports and I assure you, VS Reports may become your number one worst report designer program.

Ok people here we go:

I am strictly a Crystal Report Writer. For eight hours a day I do crystal reports for a third party software application we design. Here's the kicker. Its Crystal 5.0!!!!! Are you f'n kidding me. It does nothing. I have to trick the friggin thing just to get it to do what I want. I am truly in hell. I hate crystal reports with a passion unparralled.

Crystal XI same song different verse!

I have been using CR since 8.5 deploying projects to clients who insist on using CR because they have some people trained in writing reports. Great if you want printed reports distributed. Horrors if you want Web access to these reports. Everytime I deploy a solution with CR, I hand them a binder at least 3" thick with documents on all the quirks, bugs, known issues and crap that can happen. The documentation bites and their knowledge base search engine sucks! I have never posted anything anywhere before on a product but I HATE this software and will encourage anyone I can NOT to use it! MS Reporting Services is getting better. Please drive this company out of business!

I have been using Crystal Reports XI since October 2005 and not at all happy with the product. There are lot of bugs appearing in our SOLARIS environment and Crystal are yet to resolve them. Anyone here knows, what will be the best alternate product for Crystal to use in SOLARIS enviroment?

I have used Crystal Reports for a long time now and I'm completely satisfied with the product, where do you lame ass programmers get off ripping such a quality product???

Oh wait, no you're right it's a big pile of wank! I hate crystal every version has had a major flaw which has forced us to update to the latest version which has also a major flaw. What kind of company gives out weekly hotfixes for the same product? Business Objects Blow scrotum, I can't wait for them to fall.

I love how Crystal 11 installs web services just so it can accept parameters via a web page form.

Go Crystal. Serious Bloatware.

I got 0 in reporting coz of crystal reporting.. university life suks.. crystal report made it impossible.. shud throw this shit away

Brilliant!!!! I have been slagging off Crystal Reports since back in the days of VB3. AMAZING that this 'product' has survived this long.

Favorite CR features:-
1. GPF. No other application I have used is so easy to GPF.

2. I love the way when you select a group of fields and move them, they move out of alignment.

3. Try using commands to have subqueries and then do a 'show SQL'. CR can't even write the SQL properly.

Crystal Reports has been the bane of my computer contract career. The only pleasure I got out of it was using some of the email support at various client sites to write highly abusive and inflammatory emails to CR support and laughing at the replies.

DIE CRYSTAL DIE, LIKE THE PEICE OF CRAP YOU ARE!!!

If any of the original team that created Crystal Reports are reading this, I hope you burn in Hell for eternity.

>AMAZING that this 'product' has
>survived this long.

i think crystal is proof that we humans are really tolerant of bad software.

>If any of the original team that created
>Crystal Reports are reading this, I hope
>you burn in Hell for eternity

eternity is a pretty long time. i think a million years would be fairer. oaky, maybe two million.

but also i don't want the developers to cop the blame. i bet they're just people like us -- stuck working on software we don't always love. it's the decision makers, maybe the managerial style that is wrong.

maybe they're stuck with backward compatability issues as a result of their early successes.

whatever the excuse, i wouldn't regret the death of crystal for a moment.

I feel so much better knowing I'm not the only one. I've been searching for a solution for why CR viewer (VS2005) takes so long to open. There are only questions posted - no answers. The only answer is Crystal Sucks!!!

It is so embarrassing to charge a large amount of money for my services and deliver an application that takes 35 seconds to load and display a report. My clients are looking at me like I'm an idiot. - I guess I am - for sticking with Crystal.

After reading this, I'm going to look at ActiveReports or XtraReports.

Crystal Reports, you must die!!!!

It's amazing how such an expensive and sophisticated piece of software could cause so many companies to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on people to use it to ultimately get absolutely nothing done because it just doesn't work!!! What is the product!?! What does it do? Why am I using this?

The mind of Crystal:

SELECT 'cnt' = count(*) FROM my_table WHERE 1 < 0

cnt
---
1

What a deplorable product. You can go straight to hell Crystal.

Yes! I am not alone!

I got here by typing "Crytal Reports Sucks" into Google. I have been able to ward off Crystal for almost 10 years now by using Access Snapshot reports. But, due to a recent software upgrade I am under increased pressure to buy a half-dozen copies of Crystal so my boss can look at half-baked Crystal reports.

I am sick of VARs saying "well, I don't understand your resistance -- CR is only about 500.00..." Yeah, and how much does the wasted time fixing it cost? Or how about the training of people who have never even seen Crystal before?

My .02,
Charles

One more thing...

Why do I have to keep 717MB installation files on my C: drive?

I tried deleting them and Crusyal would not start!!! Go figure.

- Charles

well, you can partially blame Microsoft for the proliferation of Crystal. Its been included as part of VB since 5 (perhaps before then). But, I praise MS for finally making reporting services. The only thing that sucks is that, as far as I know, it only applies to SQL SERVER 2005. It would be great to be able to leverage RS as a means to get rid of the bug infested heap of crap crystal.

@Eric:
>it only applies to SQL SERVER 2005

no no -- you can definitely install reporting services on sql 2000. i was doing that for a year or two.

PDF files not exported AS IS. Are you kidding me? How can you sell a 0.5 version (Crystal 8.5) to the public that tauts to have a PDF exporter and not get it right? The BMPs are all blocky and the fonts have shrunk. I guess that's why they made it only half a version.

Hah - I'm not alone !!

I completeley agree. What a wanky, bloated piece of (very expensive) software. A real life story of marketing over substance. Crystal reports, you're days are numbered unless you pull your fingers out of your arses and start giving customers what they want !! I have never come across such a convoluted, half formed, frustrating, bewildering, limiting piece of crap.

Not to mention that after buying their product, you're only allowed 2 FREE tech support questions and then you have to pay for every question after that. (I've tried getting them for fix something but they refused to fix it since I've reached my 2 question limit.) It's $95 per question after that!!!

So not being satisfied with having the world buy their buggy/less sophiticated product but they would want to charge you for every bug you want them to resolve that shouldn't have been there in the first place.

Playing us for suckers.

WOW! Un-freaking believable!!!! I also typed in “Crystal Reports Sucks” and ended up on this page. I agree with almost every post here, except the posts which give crystal reports even the slightest amount of recognition. This software is un-usable and sucks to the lower depths of hell. Oh how I wish I had a time machine to go back and bitch slap the developers when they were coming up with the architecture for this application.

Crystal Reports, you die! You Die and go straight to HELL!!

Setting aside any development concern with Crystal their licensing is assinine. They want 8 grand for their server edition -- which only allows 5 concurrent users (FIVE!). What @#$%ing part of SERVER did they fail to comprehend. Oh, but I can get up to 20 concurrent users if I buy FOUR copies of Server. Okay, so 32 grand for 20 concurrent users -- that leaves, oh lets see (grabs calculator) only another 400 to 500 users I need to worry about!

I too googled "Crystal Reports Sucks" and landed here. Terrific vent site. Thankfully I don't actually have to use their crap, but wish sometimes I had that as an option.
I repackage software for a large enterprise. I keep getting nitwit 3rd party apps who've included Crapstal merge module redistributables. That's right, there are people in this world dumb enough to pay BO money to pollute their applications with Crapstal code. Of course they never use the same version because crystal changes versions every few days (bug fixes? LOL). And, with each major version, they move the files around (depending on the name of their company that day--BO, Crystal Dec, Seagate, etc.)--but they don't change the COM registrations. Naturally, if someone installs an old crystal polluted app after a newer one, the newer one gets h0sed in various ways. Thank you Crystal, you f'ing suck! In closing,
Crystal Reports sucks, crystal reports sucks, & crystal reports sucks.

Do not use Crystal for making reports. In fact, don't use it for anything. It is the biggest waste of time, space and money I have ever come across.

I'm a programmer and used to working around broken software and complicated stuff. After using Crystal on a daily basis for a month it's still a nightmare for me. I can't imagine how shitty it must be for other people coming from a non-tech field to use it.

It is both cheaper and faster to hire a dedicated programmer to use SQL, Java, PHP, or whatever language he prefers and in the end you get what you want rather than what Crystal forces you to accept.

Crystal is CRAP. Do yourself a big favour and never buy this garbage. Do friends a favour and make sure they know it's crap.

doing a google search for
"crystal reports piece of shit"
brings this site up first.

I was hoping for www.crystalreportsisapieceofshit.com but this site is good too. Developers complaining about what crap cr is and how much better anything else would be.

Such a relief to know I'm not alone, just recomposing myself after loosing an hour's worth of mind numbingly tedious edits thanks to the crystal designer crashing out for no particular reason.

I just cannot get over how bad the UI is. Why would you take a house-of-mirrors approach to UI design? There seem to be 50 ways to perform a certain task, but only one of them works; the rest crash or throw you into a new part of the maze.....

Virtually every time I use crystal I come away emotionally drained and depressed about the wasted afternoon and the time I am forced to waste posting cathartic messages on random messageboards.

Wow! I have been using crystal for about years. Crystal reports is great! I dont know what you guys are talking about. You cant tell me you dont get some satisfaction after spending 3 whole fucking days just trying to figure the dlls that have fucked up your reports from running, what could be more fun. Theres so much to enjoy in Crystal, I could spend the rest of my life trying to size and align stuff, in fact i think i probably will. Keep up the good work BO, or whoever the fuck owns you know. Funny how every couple of years Crystal gets sold to some other poor suspecting tech company, I just dont understand wht such a quality product keeps being sold on, hmmmm. Unfortunately it looks as though CR days are looking numbered, SQL reporting services may supersede, oh well it was fun while it lasted. I have to go now, the doctors only let me out for short breaks at a time, the medication is working but I'm still having episodes, objects around me all look out of line, where peoples faces once were all i can see is a big white space and the words Invalid TLV File or somethng like that.....OK doc I;m coming, be right there....oh really have to stop theyre putting the straight jacket on now....

I thought I was alone in Crystal hell. What did we do wrong to end up here? Is there a way out?

Faulty parsing, mysterious errors, bombing out before you have saved the "code", fully gotcha complient product, highly recommended for making you nuts... They need to hear about regression testing, correction, they need to hear about ... testing.

I'm new to Crystal, and my boss is making me use it to develop reports for our company. In the past, I've just created my own reports with sql and formatting it in html and life was good. I could develop anything I needed quite easily and developed some simple objects to help me in this regard. I thought Crystal would be better, but it just sucks. I feel as if I'm not working with the product, but am continually wrestling with it. The good news is, we're looking at sql reporting services. My days with Crystal are numbered and from what others have said about sql reporting services, hopefully I'll get some relief. But for the last couple of days, I feel that I've been busting my tail fighting this lousy softare, and all I've got are a couple of reports to show for it.

By the way, why is it that every time I edit a line object in the Crystal Editor, it crashes. Save early, save often...

Just wanted to say the thing sucks. I got here by searching for "Crystal Reports Sucks" as well. I'm just trying to get some help on their preview issues. Their forums suck, you can't find shit there to help you for XI. Every time I select an area inside of a report it hard crashes my whole machine. This happens on about 50% of the machines in our company and their isn't any one thing I can find different between them that gives me a reason to why this happens. Great product.

Wow, so all this time I might not have been crazy...oh no, I am, I still use Crystal.
Unfortunately I don't think there is an available alternative to CR for my required uses. I use it with an another CRM application, I won't say what, which runs our business and calls reports created by CR. I'm using version 10 and it's quite painful a lot of the time, it doesn't crash on me, often. The pain comes when a report that works fine in CR just doesn't work when called from the CRM app.
It defies logic, and makes me doubt my sanity.

I found this site by searching: "crystal report takes long time to open"
A report that used to run just fine has developed a runtime of about 5mins and it takes 3mins just to open the report in CR, I've traced it back to the sub-reports, when I remove them it opens much faster...BUT I NEED THE SUB-REPORTS!!!
lol

had to share the joy... I simply removed the sub-reports, then added them again, exact same method, now it works in a reasonable amount of time. The most illogical method usually works, logically this method should not have worked.

oh, and I think I cursed myself...CR has crashed three times today.

I found this site after typing crystal sucks into google also... amazing. I can't even deploy it with their merge module POS

The freaking Size/Position shit is driving me nuts. Found this site the same way everybody else did...

It's been over one and a half years since I last posted, but I find the Crystal bashing continues unabated. As it should ... I see the versions have gotten more advanced, but so have the bugs. HA!

That being said, I've personally had it with all of IT now and I'm looking for a career change as I type.

Till the next year or so ... :)

I cannot believe after 11 versions, it is still littered with bugs and usability problems! I wrote a list of 17 things, off the top of my head, that are wrong with it in 5 minutes, and the list is still growing.

I tried to checkout their website, for a "complaints" link, but I'm still looking. I tried to checkout their forums, but the message "database error, timeout expired" was far too familiar after using crystal reports for a fair amount of time.

Can anybody else understand how difficult it is to click on that tiny, tiny little control resize box!?! I'll set zoom to 500% and its still frigging tiny! Then again, I am a bit stupid, I cannot even understand why reports generated through the designer, and reports generated through .net (exporting to word) have so many, many differences that are beyond my control.

We are moving to reporting services, soon, I would work every hour of every day to ensure this happens as quickly as possible. I'm welcoming overtime with open arms for this.

and aside, their marketing engine keeps sending me completely rubbish, about how I can become a reporting hero after switching to crystal, I sent a reply back asking them to stop sending me propaganda, then I starting receiving the rubbish in French as well?!?

May I suggest other terms that could bring you here via google;

Crystal Reports Pants
Crystal Reports Wank
Crystal Reports Aneurysm
Crystal Reports Sucks Monkey Balls

Damn the man who invented crystal sucks reports. it is illogical how it operates and impossible to troubleshoot. i can achieve more with a pen a paper. crystal reports sucks

I've posted here before about crystal reports, but I don't think it's getting a balanced review :) I know it's not perfect, but it is much better than pen and paper.
Once you get to grips with the illogical behaviour it is possible to produce useful output with minimal effort. For me, the satifaction in using crystal comes from perceived benefit to the end user that will be working with the report in their daily work, gathering large amounts of data and make peoples lives easier.

but if I get another business objects junk email in french...

"The freaking Size/Position shit is driving me nuts."
try using guideline handles?

'Crystal Monkey" --> ""The freaking Size/Position shit is driving me nuts."
try using guideline handles?

Geesh. It's not our fault we wish to use the feature that looks like it should work. How much less intuitive is using guidelines?

Anyway I decided to do the 1-gig trial version download after trying very very hard to work with an old CR 6 report, hoping that life is good and beautiful after 5 full version numbers (as I have learned since, the numbers mean nothing. but i digress)

The very same thing that drove me nuts in CR 6 is STILL there. Amazing. I checked on their website to make sure I'm not crazy or just missing an obvious button, but no, the bug report was filed 2002, and claims to only happen to previous versions. When BO isn't even updating the BUG REPORTS can you really expect them to fix the actual bug? Simply amazing.

I might have kept it for the full 30 days of trial (...hah, pun unintended) except they won't let me save them in old CR formats, and our dinosaur era VB6 programs can't open the new ones. So long, CRX1.

Just have to chime in (yes, I found this forum via "Crystal Reports Sucks" too). I have a client that doesn't just want to use CR, they want CR SERVER. And guess who gets to set it up.

It's been a week. It's still not 100% functional. There's a blatant bug where the DHTML viewer will botch a password connection. I spent two days working on THAT until I finally thought - out of desperation - to try the Java viewer, and that worked fine. Also, as near as I can tell, there's no way to kick users out of the system from the Control Console.

And it allows multiple logins from the same user and happily counts them as "concurrent." Even if it's from the same IP. At one point I had 4 instances of the EXACT SAME login, and there was no way to kick off the ghosts except to restart the service.

And their idiot KB doesn't even know basic SMTP error codes. They're trying to claim a code of 535 means... the TO: address is incorrect. Yes, it really says this. Yet if I called them to point out this error, it'd cost me $200.

I want to die. And take this POS with me.

So, I called on Friday for Tech Support. I find out the product has to be "registered" before we can get support. Fine, register it.

Except this process, apparently, takes 5 hours. They call sometime after I've gone home for the weekend to tell me that, congratulations, I'm now allowed to call tech support.

It'd be nice if they'd given me the ph # for that, of course. So I get in today and call customer service to get the number. She transfers me to tech support. I sit on hold five minutes, then it says it's connecting me to a rep. I hear two rings and then the line drops to a fast busy.

I call back. I get a human. In India. I describe my problems. To her credit, she didn't make me go through any inane troubleshooting. Instead, she just tells me I'll have to talk to an "engineer" and it'll be 24-36 hours before I get a call back about that.

This is a server application. It's not like we, oh, purchased it to USE it. Or could possibly have any actual business need for it! No, of course not. We just LOVE spending eight grand for a set of pretty HTML menus. REALLY!

Eight thousand dollars and, so far, I've gotten better support from AOL.

Ok Jason, you get the shovel, I'll get the lime.

let's bury CR, BO and AOL in the same hole.

Amazing how I come back to this thread year after year, after long breaks, and find the Crystal bashing going on unabashed.

Well, after changing my country of residence, jobs, and everything ... one's thing HAS remained constant. I dont use and have never used Crystal after my first job!

:biggrin:

More power to all that bash Crystal reports, see ya'll around in a few months.

First, I got here by Googling "Why Does Crystal Reports Suck so bad?"

This page is like the best support group I could have ever found. I'm on my second contract where I have to use Crystal Reports and I cannot believe the dimensions of insanity buried within it.

Imagine the logic and personality of the craziest girlfriend you ever had. That is Crystal Reports.

Every frustrating, senseless thing that has happened to me using CR, has been mentioned in this page.

Thanks for the relief.

'Dubes (will kill BO guys for free!)' on Fri, 11 May 2007 13:33:23 GMT, sez:

People you have no idea how good it felt when I found you all on this page! I am a highly frustrated person due to the curse on humanity a.k.a Crystal Reports XI. I have faced all the problems mentioned in this page and more...

This is officially the crappiest tool i have ever worked on... damn thing does nothing! Does it even have a support? I only see questions being asked... none ever answered... how many hours have i wasted on this god forsaken tool! With database as Sybase i tell you I had some tough time... they are as incompatible as cats and dogs!

To get any work done you have to modify the database... WTF? Why does it crash so often? Why isnt anything as it is supposed to be? Was it created by primates?

I was working on Actuate before it... I have not seen it mentioned on this page anywhere... dudes i suggest go for actuate! its a wonderful tool... IT LETS YOU CODE! debugger is fantastic, flexibility unlimited... I LOVE ACTUATE... I HATE CRYSTAL... i will celebrate like crazy when the world is free of CRYSTAL... i am pretty young... barely 23... still i wonder if i will survive to see that day come!

Can we do something about it?

'Dubes (will kill BO guys for free!)' on Fri, 11 May 2007 13:37:19 GMT, sez:

P.S.: Lucky you froo...

The most frustrating thing is that I cannot stop using this tool till December... and they better pay me an insanely high salary to make me work on this dumb a** tool again... Makes me wanna get up and smash my machine to bits... DIE YOU S.O.B... DIE... DIE...

They all suck, both Crystal and RS.

We all know Crystal suck (actually it has sucked for the last 15 years), and the support and progress of the product is shocking but then when Rs come into being our hope were raised.

RS has big problems too, i.e You can't export to Word - can you beleve it!!!!

You cannot easily fix sections to the bottom of the page.

You cannot enter linked data in the header section...

If you want to do anything fancy then you end up having to write your own RDL files. IE Flexible configuring of sections, during runtime in your report.

I could go on an on, and I caught between two badly designed, badly supported products.

Please,please tell me I am wrong and give me the answers to these problems - if not then you have to agree with me.

Poorly designed at the outset and never improved in either design or implemention Buggy at run-time and even buggier at design-time, Crystal Reports is the world's largest single collection of defects. Even Windows pales in comparison. Windows mostly does work, while CR mostly doesn't, and if Windows isn't in fact any faster than it was ten years ago that's because it does a whole lot more. Such Windows bugs as are more or less institutionalised have become so because a great deal of code depends on those quirks to work.

I am surprised at the comment by another reader that MS Access crashes frequently; this has not been my experience, and I have used it for a good ten years in five or six versions on at least four major versions of Windows. Access, however, is suitable only for one of the modes of use that CR purports to support. In particular it is completely unsuited to server based production of reports for internet delivery. Par contre, one could credibly argue that CR can't really be used like that either, partly due to its general defectiveness and partly due to its absurd licensing model.

I suspect that this is the underpinning observation motivating Microsoft's release of SQL Reporting - it fulfils this role very well, performs well, has a suitable licensing model and is well adapted to code based extension.

Considering the pricing model - basically free if you already use MS SQL Server - it's actually a compelling argument in favour of MS SQL Server. One can only shake one's head in wonderment that middle management cretins still cough up for CR. Perhaps we should suggest they go with MS Reporting Services and award the CR budget to themselves as a cleverness bonus. It would be worth it to see the back of CR.

I'm actually looking into developing a reporting system myself as part of a much larger system that I and a couple of colleagues are preparing for market.

Why bother when MS SQL Reports is basically free? Our preliminary design supports some fundamental changes of approach to to report design. In particular, most CR style report designers (Access, for example, is almost the same as CR except that it works) do not support the notion of embedding values in a large block of formatted text that uses flow-based layout (think mail-merge with a word processor).

Many commerical uses of reports would greatly benefit from this capability, especially if combined with the ability to embed subreports that can use the traditional tabular layout.

We depart from the norm with tabular layout, too - once you've acknowledged that the layout is tabular, why fiddle about positioning little boxes? The structure of the table and the size of the content dictates this for you (think HTML tables).

There's more along these lines. Sooner or later we'll release it.

Crystal reports was not really intended to be used by developers and that is where your problems come from. For simple reporting by end users it is a reasonably efficient tool providing the databases being reported on a properley contructed. That unfortunately is the problem, most databases one comes across nowadays are contructed by many people adding their own tables to existing databases. As these people are in the main programmers who happen to be the most arrogant beings on earth who think their way must be best, always 'start again' and re-invent tables that exist in a slightly different form or more likely only consider the application they are currently working on rather than overall Enterprise requirements.

'Crystal Reports = Pile of Steaming Dog Sh*t' on Thu, 21 Jun 2007 17:58:43 GMT, sez:

Bloated, Convoluted, Complicated, Piece of Crap. It's a wonder anything gets done with it. The bigwigs rave about it. I just can't figure it out. Something simple yet important like turning on/off selecting distinct records is buried in the menus. This is just the tip of the iceberg with this truckload of elephant turds.

AMM your a fuxkin moron... ask yourself this, why are we paying all this money for a product that touts itself as the greatest reporting tool in the history of mankind, when all it is ment to do is be used by half assed non programmers to build simple "data dump" reports? crystal should be free since it is less efficient then the jasper reports... acutally jasper is free so crystal should pay us for using this p.o.s

and another point... why do we change the database tables?, well its not b/c it makes our lives easier (programmers are lazy) but sometimes there just isnt any fuxkin way around it. the customers drive the product and all changes that must be made to it. this is just a vicious circle... the customer points the finger at support, support points the finger at the programmer and the programmer points the finger back at the customer. this cycle will never change, so the products that we use should have a better understanding of how a business works b/c a business and its products are ALWAYS changing. unfortunately crystal does not compensate for change that well.

also, heres the problem with the example you gave... if we didnt change the tables and let them be, then we would get another complaint about , i dunno, the table searches being too slow. so inorder to beat this much larger beast we change the tables... do me a favor, tell urself and all your sub programming friends quit ur godamn whinning u freakin pu**ys.

you know why were so arrogant... cuz we have to constantly explain ourselves to morons like you who think they know can do it better. our arrogance arrise from our frustration with people who built an acess db and now thinks they know everything about the programming world. next time a programmer tells you he has to change something... do me a favor and try doing it yourself for a change. then maybe you'll understand y we do the things we do b/c my guess is u couldnt even write a hello world in java... and you probably dont even know what a hello world is or means.

shut your mouth douche!

to everyone else... please keep posting on how crappy this product is... and if your looking for a GREAT alternative... JASPER REPORTS AND IREPORTS... jasper is the engine and ireports is the gui interface to build the reports. its a freakin awesome java product and easy as hell to integrate.

Yeah AMM... shut your hole... this is a forum for Crystal Haters... what were you trying to do man... you have any idea how crystal is ruining our lives? Not a day goes by when I am stuck by a query that ruins my day... to answer it I really have to wring my brains. It is pathetic I say cause most of the drawbacks of crystal that I try to solve are features in any standard reporting tool.

I hate crystal and i believe none of the BO guys will ever get into heaven for they have unleashed this sh*tty thing over humanity and have marketed it so g*d d@mn well...

"Amm" refers to us as arrogant... well what would you call our clients and managers, to whom the tool looks bright and very user friendly to develope reports. They ask us to deliver impossible things at a moments notice... they have all the right to ask... cause they think they bought the best that money could buy... they must think we are really crappy programmers over here.

My team has literally given up their personal lives to deliver reports. We have solved so many issues... we have found really innovative solutions... and what i feel is that I have never come accross a simple and direct solution even to the simplest of the problems... this indeed s*cks... how come crystal has survived this far? I have promised to god... i will kill this Crystal thing once and for all... i will make a better reporting tool... sell it for a little money... use that money to buy the best MBA guys from accross the world... market my product... and when crystal has died... i would keep selling my product for two more months and then I will give it away for free... what ever money that i earn in those two months, i would use it to erase the presence of the words "Crystal Reports" and "BusinessObjects" to an extent that googling those words would not retrieve a single perfect match... though i would surely miss this page then...

I love you guys... i feel very sentimental now... Keep this page alive till i manage to kill CRYSTAL... help me people in keeping this page alive and in my killing crystal. Atleast pray for me...

I often wonder if this website has been noticed by business objects and their developers. I would suspect not, as that would be partial acknowledgment to ownership of said steaming pile of turd; who would own up to that?

But I would imagine if they have read this they must be the most stubborn, delusional people in the world not to take some of this too heart and listen to the people who actually have to use the product.

I for one would be willing to setup several e-mail servers mass mailing the address of this website to every conceivable @businessobjects.com e-mail address just to get noticed, and live in hope somebody will take notice. but I doubt it. the email would probably have to be in French for them to understand it.

big LOL at ethos71, AMM really touched a nerve calling programmers arogant, which means he's probably right.
Dubes point about impossible requests from those who know little or nothing about using the tools is something I'm familiar with. It's developing those "innovative solutions" that make using crystal mildly amusing for me, on the whole it's a very bland application.

btw, i was just checking the shallow grave I buried CR, BO and fuxkin AOL in!

Well, I'm back - 4 months after the last post. Like clockwork. ;)

I can safely report now that the Crystal nightmares are few and far in between. I can actually LOOK at a report now and not sweat buckets thinkin about how I am going to have to design it (even if I wasn't the one designing it), which is a good start in itself. Also, I've managed to forget some of the idiotic errors Crystal gave me every time I tried to use it with a different DB (odbc my ass. I could stuff my head in the machine and link better to a db than Crystal can).

Congratulations to you guys doing the bashing, keep the spirit alive. I'll be back to check on ya'll in another few months! :D

FROO

I just survived A WEEK trying to do something needing EIGHT HOURS, and today I'm trying to add a simple formula to a */%&$%/&@ing report.... Obviously, all this after 5 years of suffering and pain. How an application like "Crystal Reports" (my only uncensored rude word) can be so £"%&£&%ing stupid that compared to a custom XML DataSet with a XSLT transform, the second is more confortable and powerful as a reporting tool?

the only thing I can say:

$£%&&%$&%£$$£ Crystal Reports ! ! ! ! ! !

I find it humorous at the comments. I have been a programmer for decades and now that I use Crystal Reports I think it's easy. I have used one simple thing in Crystal and run reports against a 2 Terabyte oracle database, selecting from dozens of tables additionally linking to another (redbrick) database only takes seconds to a minute (both databases are live to 3000 user at any given time). Written properly in Crystal I have one report doing several full table scans selecting over 300 million rows AND using parameters conditionally (yes the users do NOT have to fill in the parameters). If I want to make the reports run faster, I can always leverage a Stored procedure. Oh, and in our shop, we are able to produce reports java developes can't even think about getting to work right.

Do it your way... bunch of whiners.

'Konijn'

You're no programmer any person in the right mind who has to suffer Crystal for years must be a casual user or low rate developer.

I encoutered Crystal, once 8 years ago and it sucked, very difficult to user compared to most modern drag and drop GUIs this application suffers from low rate developer syndrome.
Fast forward to 2005 yep I was tainted again with the curse of cystal v10.0 LOL! what a crime it's hardly changed. After spending half a day battling with it I decided to writing my own reporting engine which I C# was the langunage and the framework was purely a wrapper around GDI and the .net printing services.

It seems the Cystal Team are suffering from replacing the developers who original work on v1.0.

Crystal you suck and RIP when some other capable company comes along and shows you to develop a modern Reporting tool.

That is the same people w

Trying to add a VARCHAR(1) field to a report.......
5 and an half hour and no result.

FUCK CRYSTAL REPORTS !!!

Andrea,

Try using the command line instead. Select from your database using SQL select statements.

You can do ANYTHING in crystal if you use commands.

:-D

You can do anything more than everything if you use your own software instead of crystal.

You guys (most) are shot out.... cant do anything with crystal.. it sucks.. whatever.. IT IS because YOU dont know how... then you go ranting and raving about it?

Crystal does what you tell it to do. If you dont know how to do something... then dont blame the program

???? Crystal does what you tell it to do. ????

WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU SAYING?????

C++ does what you tell it to do, Visual Basic does what you tell it to do, GDI does what you tell it to do, OpenGL does what you tell it to do. SO don't say fuckwords, a program where neither a fopen works inside of it doesn't deserve users to work with it. And if you don't know what a fopen is LEAVE THIS BLOG.

SkipDal and Konijn must be CR insiders trying to spread misinformation. CR blows! The support sucks and the help files are damn near useless. All I want to do is adjust the column positions at runtime. I've already spent two days looking through CR help, and the examples given generate object errors. CR Blows!!!!

I don't work for Business Objects and I agree, they have no "help" desk and their online documentation sucks, but everything you "programmers" are whining about I have done easily through a .net web page, CE services, through a program as embedded software. I just think it's funny how easy the program is and so many people just can't figure it out. The most powerful things in the tool are not placed their for the casual "report writer". and stop using wizards and relying on the buttons and "Easy" tools. Start thinking like a programmer and write "report" code like in any other report tool and then it starts working for you.

konijn

this could make sense, but in my company there are too few people able to understand your words. This means I will always have to fight against crappy reports.

Andrea,

Sorry to hear that. Unfortunately there are many people that believe that because they have a tool they can do it. Business Objects sell a good tool to stupid people and make all of our lives a little harder because of it. I have a good team of hand-picked people. SOund like you just got the crap end of the stick, but I've been there and feel your pain.

thanks for your words.... just proposed in office and they answered "Yes, why not use 0s and 1s ?" "Hey, never thoght about assembly? I think it's the future!"

So..........

all right enough of this...
you dare call us stupid??? well here is short list I am presenting from just the top of my mind, i am using CRXIR2SP2... thats the latest they have to offer:
1. If a text field is there, crystal doesnot display its full length, if you have to show a field till 1 inch, the field on the designer would have to be 1 1/4 inch. (is that what I had asked it to do?)
2. I just tried to suppress a control with the condition "If abs(<field>) = 0 then true else false"... it didnot work... instead I had to write a formula if (<fld> < 0 & <fld> > -1) then true else false. I created a formula which returned ABS(<fld>) and placed it in the section I was trying to suppress the control, guess what it returned... "0" though the control was unsuppressed. (it still does what I ask it to do right?)
3. Unknown database connector error.
4. Unknown query engine error on the server, which I am able to solve by logging off and logging back in again... simple ain't it?
5. I tried to give a graph Color highlights... all colors were fine except for the last one... JUST FOR FUN, I added another row to the data & what I see is... now the color that was previously coming wrong is coming as expected (correctly) but the new row I put gave me a wrong color... even when i was able to check that the condition would be true... konijn... kindly explain to me the logic... where am I going wrong?

I better stop here... but this was just the tip of the iceberg...

I would be back really soon to see konjin's reply to this post...

Kept that I agree with your anger for points 1 3 4 5.... can you explain point 2 ? ? ?

'Dubes... Just another day in hell...' on Fri, 12 Oct 2007 07:50:48 GMT, sez:

For andrea...

I had a field in which I had to show some calculated value. But I didnt want to show it if someother value when rounded & taken as absolute equals zero. (i.e. when the other number is in between -1 to 1). So I wrote a suppress condition:
"If (Abs(Round(The other Number)) = 0) Then
True
Else
False;"

It didn't work... so I put a formula in my report in the same section. Just to see what value is returned. So I wrote the formula... Which returned "Abs(Round(The other Number)"
in the preview i swear I saw its value 0 whereever it was supposed to be. Then this time I put the same suppress condition on this new formula I hd written... and it didnt work again... though it was showing the value as zero, it was not suppressing it. Does it mean in Crystal 0 is not equal to zero.
I changed my suppress condition to:
"If <the other number> = (-1 _to_ 1) Then True else false" it worked...

Tell me where did I go wrong... apart from using Crystal... :(

it is a common misunderstanding..... crystal makes you believe it works in some way...... But it works in another!!! I had a call to a function where the auto syntax told: (year, month, day) ..... not working.... I inverted the order and MAGIC ! ! ! it worked....... imagine me screaming in office :)

As Andrea stated "crystal makes you believe it works in some way...... But it works in another"

So Dubes, I never said you were stupid, But managers think that any tool can be used by any fool. If it were that easy, they wouldn't need developers. If you are a programmer, then you just need to figure out a little crystal logic.

For starters, clicking on a condition (x+1) button already makes the assumption of an if then statement so your conditional suppress formula need only be "Abs(Round(The other Number)) = 0"

So try that and see. As far as #1, I have had issues where a field displays in the designer with smaller font type than on the CE server, but just as an html/asp or other web page designer can tell you, spacing, font size etc. is dependent on the browser being used. Also what are platform are you using.

Unknown database error, that isn't so vague, I have seen it, but it is dependent on your server configuration, if you have clusters or not, how your VIP is set up, AD or LDAP settings. This could easily be related to to a disconnect in server authentication due to your security groups.

4 is related I believe to timeout settings. There are many timeout settings to change, some are in seconds and some in milliseconds. Or it could be related to your java installation. We only got this once, changed a few things and no one gets it anymore, so I don't quite remember.

As far as the graph, sorry can't help you there, we do everything in black and white and we set up our charts in command lines using oracle functions (lead/lag/rownum etc.)

Ok Konijn, you know how to change the column position at run time, lay it on me. Oh, and I'm not using .Net or the crystal server, just a simple VB6 app calling a crystal report. Now what is the object references to use in order to get to the column.

OK, today I came to the scientific demonstration that Crystal Reports Sucks even when I'm doing a mistake. WHY and I repeat WHY, crystal reports gives an infinite junkpile of useless errors when I'm doing it right, and when I'm doing it wrong it doesn't give a fucked message ???

@Konjin:
Regarding point1:
I am exporting it to PDF... also tried printing it directly. Now, let me explain my situation again... I think you have it wrong... font is not shrinking... it is not occupying all of the space... my text box is of 2 inches width, the text wraps and goes to the next line from 1 2/3rd inches... why does it leave 1/3 of an inch blank... and if god forbid my text box is of width >5 inches... it leaves more than an inch of gap before wrapping... believe me there is more than enough space for the next word to fit in.

Issue 2: Yes, I first tried with "Abs(Round(The other Number)) = 0" in the suppress condition... when it did not work... i used the if else condition to see how it is evaluating the condition... as discovered... it was evaluating it in a wrong way... :(

Issue 3: Unknown database error is a super set... i get this error for everything... from a divide by zero error to time out... to every other concievable database error... it would have been helpful and very convinient if the error message contained more information... right now it is telling me... "Hey something wrong somewhere... I don't know what and where... go look your self lazy bones... " and I HATE being called a lazy bone.

Issue 4: Same thing... wish the error message was a bit more helpful...

Issue 5: I am so happy for you that you dont have to use colors in graph... doing any work on graph apart from dragging and dropping them on the report causes nightmares... we have worked on so many cases... where the users wanted so many seemingly impossible things with Graphs...

About you calling me Stupid... no hard feelings... I don't care much about other people's assesments of me... till they have worked with me...

But... see... reason we all come here is that the tool is CRAP... and help from outside is almost NON EXISTENT... i do my bit... I try and help out people on week ends... through Google Groups and IT toolbox and others... but still the number of questions is over whelming...It is a losing battle...

Crystal is the shittest piece of shit the world has every known. Any thing that you think should only take a couple of minutes normally takes 2 days, their support is crap, trying to get the correct merge modules is normally just about impossible, and even if you do manage it when you try to run the report you find you have to write about a hundred lines of code to change the server and database that the report points to. I hate it with an absolute passion as it is utter utter utter wank. I haven't even mentioned the unexpected crashes when you do something like move a label a couple of pixels to the right and that is even after you have applied the latest service pack or downloaded the service release (normally about 500 megs worth of shit). Issues that have been fixed in an earlier release come back - have these guys never heard of source control?

Any way that is probably enough for now.

I freely admit I don't know everything about the software, but get this.

SubReports - trying to suppress from within main report - looks for ODBC connection on local box rather than server - no its not attempting to refresh or reload or whatever that little tab suggests for the sub report. Move the display boolean logic inside the subreport, and fucking aye, it works.

Viewer software - embeded in delphi app - opens the report - called from web with crystals own viewer to display - invalid cross tab formula error - funnily enough it opens in the designer OK, and in the embeded viewer.

Viewer takes longer to open the report than to create in first place.

Been programming C++, Delphi, VB, ASP, JSP blah blah for 20 years. We have two fully skilled Crystal Developers here and even they know its a big pile of poo.

"Speed to market" business people do not understand software development I expect. We are going to look around and try other solutions

- 2 support calls my arse - I can get away with one. "hello, - "yes", "Could you explain to me how to get this shit to work properly", "Oh you don't know", "bye".

To the Dodo hunters:

I didn't find this site by typing "Crystal Reports Sucks" into Google, but I might as well have. After spending the last month successfully getting a 170 page web report consisting of a few dozen main reports, a pile of sub-reports, a custom table of contents, 5 different bar graph formats (with custom colours), 2 dozen custom sql queries, 2 big ugly pie charts and a little Java servlet working with Jasper Reports, I figured that doing 4 simple Crystal reports using CR XI would be a piece of cake.

It all started out well, the reports were fine, but I needed to do a messy join to get some data that the DB designers had not provided conveniently. The last crappy version of CR I'd used was 8.5, so I went looking for the query designer. All the help told me if I wanted to edit SQL I should go to the "show SQL" page, no luck, it does exactly what its name indicates. Eventually I found the "command" feature. I went to MS/SQL Management Studio, wrote and tested my query, it selected the desired data in .5 secs, so I ported it into the "command". Since the command uses a date range it took nearly 5 minutes to run in CR. I'll see if a view in MS/SQL will get trick CR into thinking it's working with a table.

Much more of this and I will recommend that we use MS/Access for the simple stuff and Jasper and IReport for anything complicated.

For those not familiar with Jasper, its a Java based clone of some early version of CR, without the nasty pile of bugs, the stupid licensing, DLLs, etc. It has no support, but the forum is usually helpful. IReport is a GUI editor that is far superior to CR's but similar enough that all your experience isn't totally lost. Being written in Java means that you can program around any of its deficiencies and being open source means you can fix it if you think it sucks. the authors will probably thank you.

JR is also on the young but stable side, it's just released version 2.02

To Konijn:

You say that commands make this all work, so how do I use a command to do a complex join with a "where date between '{?sdate}' and '{?edate}'" and still run in a short amount of time?
Or should I try using the view?

To Jasper John:

Push the joins and query handling and processing to a stored procedure in the database... trust me that IS the fastest way to retrieve data.

Crystal Reports is the shittiest application that I have had the misfortune of working with. All I'm trying to do is count the number of nulls in the column. Simple, right? WRONG!!!

Thank god I'm not alone. Crystal is the most frustrating piece of crap I've ever used. It's comforting to know that that are so many others share the frustration.

Crsytal report really sucks when we deploy with shared hosting. I hate Crystal Report!!!!!

Agreed. Banded reports are over. why haven't they got on with it and copied the ms way of freeform placement in report design? Put your footer wherever you like.
Reporting services is going to kill CR. I just wonder why MS hasn't got round to finishing the job yet and marketing it properly.

Dubes:
I wonder if your formula might not be working due to it not being evaluated at the right time.
e.g.
WhilePrintingRecords
or
EvaluateAfter(<blah>)

I'm still using Crystal, it's not hard to use, but it does have some interesting quirks and downright daft bugs. but it's better than pissing into the wind...or is it?

Lately I've been working with SQL Reporting Services... and my girlfriend has been doing reports with the dreaded dodo.

Curiously, in her hands it seems to behave itself. Admittedly she isn't managing deployment; she squarely represents the intended audience; power users operating in an environment in which CR has already been successfully(!) deployed.

The reports she's producing are elaborate reproductions of government forms so that her organisation doesn't have to transcribe by hand, and the data source is even more prehistoric than CR. Would you believe the'yre using BTRIEVE? It's an ancient accounting system.

Predictably I have been conscripted into providing tuition and assistance (I'm a geek with an attractive girlfriend, it was inevitable) and she's having such success you might almost believe CR wasn't a steaming pile of donkey poo.

To a large extent I suspect this to be a result of my showing her functions and loops and not SQL, so she does everything programmatically, using groups as implied loops.

Back to the rather more pleasant world of SSRS...

I think I should draw it to your collective attention that if you download SQLEXPR_ADV.EXE from Microsoft you get SQL Express and Reporting Services, which is free - and the SQL Express licence covers the installation of SSRS.

Yes yes, SQL Express is nice but your organisation uses Oracle/whatever?

Here's the interesting bit: SSRS uses ADO.NET which comes with the .NET framework 2.0, and it includes drivers for MSSQL, Oracle, Jet (MSAccess), ODBC and SQLOLEDB. So you can use it with Oracle and mysql among others.

I haven't tried to anchor a section to the bottom of the page, I must have a crack at that. Certainly everything else I've tried has been easy and straightforward, although I am inclined to prepare my data using stored procs, functions and views, so that my SQL looks like SELECT * FROM <relation> WHERE <condition>

I do this primarily because I'm lazy and it's less work if you separate production from presentation.

DO NOT TRY TO USE SQLEXPR_ADV.EXE to add SSRS to an existing installation of SQL Express, it will completely screw up SQL Express on your computer.

If you want to add SSRS to an existing installation you need SQLEXPR_TOOLKIT.EXE which comes in two flavours, one of which includes SP2 and the other doesn't. They have exactly the same name so search for "SQLEXPR_TOOLKIT.EXE" on the MS website and read carefully before downloading.

@Pontificating Pete:

Hey thanks for the great SSRS and Crystal info. Hope things are going great for you PeteW! Best of luck mate.

Hi all,

Am pissed off at crystal as it is... the worst part of this piece of monkey crap s/w is... if there is a vexing question you want to search the web for, you will get a million hits all looking really promising... but the worst part is... all those posts in all those forums will have people asking the same question... no answers...
god dang I am so pissed off right now... Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr...

But..... what's this crystal reports are you all talking about??? Is a program for printing data from a database?
I have a program with similar features on my pc, but it's called Vomitgate Shittal Fuckports. Is this "crystal" better??

I am a damned fool... I am stuck with crystal, though it is the nastiest pile of turd to be packed into an executable file, the B*@#$!*$ at BO somehow make it look like a garden of roses to the management!
I checked out the Crystal Reports 2008, thought hey they are tracking so many bugs, SAP has taken over it, BO has had time to work with it, maybe, just maybe, it is no longer shitty to work with, guess what I was wrong (though somewhere deep inside I expected it!).
We had raised a case with BO to allow for multiple page layouts in the report, it is a feature now in 2008, the first report in which I tried it... CR32.exe has encountered a fatal problem! ROFL...
One consolation, you can add flash animation, so, what I am going to try next is to make the graphs in flash and put it on the report (should give me a better output than Crystal!)
F*ck me... I have lost it!

I would like the next Service Pack for Windows to include Crystalware detection: if something is somehow related to crystal--->istant application crash

If there is one thing that really gets my goat, ok, two things that get my goat, people suffering and people watching other people suffer.
If i can find the motivation, rofl, i will make it my mission to hunt down crystal problems on the web and post an answer, even if it isn't that helpful.

...and then i woke up and realised i had to get to work.

i just got sooooo pissed off at trying to deploy a piece of carp crystal report to a web server that I typed in "crystal report sucks"... and I got here. It blows so freaking bad that I have been vomitting into my mouth all day. Seriously, who the hell could possibly want to use this garbage? And how come the Business Objects website can't have a very easy, step by step guide to deploying a crystal report application over to a webserver from visual studio 2005? Worst fing product E V E R, thanks for 2 hours of my life I'll never get back.

I almost forgot.........

F U C K C R Y S T A L R E P O R T S

--------------------------------------------------

Bryan,

if you've only wasted 2 hours of your life, you got off lucky.

oh joy;

Creating an instance of the COM component with CLSID {7487987A-DED9-4D16-A5C0-EB6AB3653411} from the IClassFactory failed due to the following error: 8007000e.

you google for these error messages and theres never a straight answer or a cause to the problem.

Let me get on the bandwagon here and say that I think we are not being fair to Crystal Reports when we say that it sucks. Er, um, well, what I mean is that not only does Crystal Reports suck, their support sucks, their documentation sucks, and the web itself is just loaded with "code solutions" for Crystal that dont work. Of course, Al Gore's "Information Superhighway" has never been, in my opinion, much more than an "overloaded information landfill" - like an enormous garbage dump you have to plow through to find even one piece of "good" information (but then, thats for another rant...).

I have been a developer for enough decades that I recall the earliest versions of Crystal which were in fact, pretty good. But I agree with other postings and their posters who say that since .NET, Crystal has become a useless, frustrating piece of crap - and I acknowledge that yes, even before .NET Crystal had been kicked around from company to company so much that it was already like some rotting leftover that gets inadvertantly buried deep in some fridge.

Still, Crystal has one redeeming fact going for it - the humor it generates. For example, having experienced what it is like to try to get support from SAP for Crystal, I would advise anyone that you will have a much easier time getting a date with the Queen of England than you would get good support from SAP. Oh, and just getting the date with the Queen is easier too! I tried to get support from SAP and what an adventure! It only took three days before I had given them all the "codes and keys" they wanted to even try to help me - and then (!!!) - I talked to three different tech at Crystal Support and guess what??? Each tech disagreed with the prior tech, and the third guy who gave me my "solution" was simply wrong!!! In the end nothing got resolved, or fixed - indeed, I am now convinced that Crystal themselves do not know how to fix a simple logon and parameter error I keep getting. Convinced? Yes, convinced. I mean how many times do you need to contact the "experts" and watch them bumble and fumble along before you realize, these are not experts - these are "ecks-purts" - just vomiting stayed 'solutions' back at you that I doubt they have even tested.

Of course, like I say, the web itself is a landfill... One guy from overseas saw my Crystal posting and replied with "an answer to [your] problem with Crystal". His solution didnt work of course, and within the time I was testing it, two other posters had already posted messages that his code would not work.

No, its not enough to say Crystal sucks - we need to make the point that Crystal sucks and there isnt a human being alive who has a handle on the beast. Like another poster out there, I too typed "Crystal Sucks" into Google and low-and-behold, got plenty of hits. Hmmm, wonder why no one at SAP, let alone MS has gotten the message.

Well, Crystal HAS inspired me though, and also helped in my "Time management" processes. What is that? Well, instead of screwing around with Crystal too much now, I keep telling the boss how much we need to dump it - and when this morning I showed him all the negative postings about it - he said, "yeah, maybe youre right!"

May Crystal die in software hell with fires licking its butt!!!

Clubbing the Crystal Dodo

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