Crystal Reports Viewer in ASP.NET3.5 App

Question

I created a ASP.NET3.5 website having a crystalreportviewer in it, it works fine if I run through visual studio 2008 or on my own machine. But when i deployed project on web server, it started giving me error.

Firstly it was giving error on first page that CrystalDecision.web assembly can't be found, then I installed Crytal Runtime 2008 on my web server. After installation application seems like ok, but when I opened page with CrystalReportViewer it gave me different error, as following:

The located assembly's manifest definition does not match the assembly reference. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x80131040)

Any idea about it??

Answer 1

After spending almost 2hrs I finally found the fix.

1. Uninstall the Crystal Reports run time from web server.

2. Check if web server still have \program files\Business object folder, if still exist then delete it. Ensure other applications are not dependent on it.

3. Give Read and Write access permissions to ASPNET user on \windows\Temp folder

4. Install Crystal Report run time now.
5. Restart IIS

Following these steps should fix the crystal report viewer problem.

But then one more problem arises, crystal report viewer doesnt show the icons, the reason is crystal report viewer looks for aspnet_client\system_web\2_0_50727 folder in root folder of the website. In my case I have multiple websites on my server including .NET 1.1, 2.0 and ASP, so I have wwwrootASP2.0 folder for this website. But by default web server created aspnet_client\system_web\2_0_50727 folder under default website (wwwroot). So, the fix is, just copy that aspnet_client\system_web\2_0_50727 folder into your website's root directory. Bingo !!!!!! It works fine now.

I hope it will help,

Cheers.

Answer 2

You probably have slightly different versions of the crystal assemblies on the server and your development machine. Compare the version numbers in c:\windows\assembly on both and see if there is a difference. If there is, either update the server or change the version numbers for the assemblies in web.config.

Also, The located assembly's manifest definition does not match the assembly reference

Answer 3

I just wanted to add that an easier way seems to be creating a virtual directory under you web application called aspnet_client that points to C:\Inetpub\wwwroot\aspnet_client.

This also makes the images on the crystal report viewer show up. It was tested with visual studio 2008 crystal basic on IIS running on server 2003.

I figured this out after reading http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/vscrystalreports/thread/e2dc93b3-e594-4ae6-ba92-9440ccc7f6be.