Share functions between Crystal Reports without Crystal Reports Server?

Question

We have several reports that do the same formatting operations (e.g. displaying "PASS" or "FAIL" if a value is within a particular range.)

Without Crystal Reports Server, is there a way to share functions between reports so that they do not need to be duplicated? I understand I could do this with a user function library but I would prefer not to port all of the crystal functions to UFL.

Using Crystal Reports 2008.

Answer 1

The only other option I know would be to port the functions to Stored Procedures or Database Functions. This is actually a better implementation (in general) as the Crystal Reports Client Processing is much slower than the SQL Server. so your pass or fail would become a function or stored proc or even the use of a case statment in the Select Query.

Good rule of thumb with crystal reports, flatten out the dataset as much as possible before returning the dataset to Crystal. This will allow you to use the power of the Database server before relying on the Client to handle the processing. The perfect example is to return 1 million rows to the client but flatten it out to only displaying totals from 5 groups. Crystal will choke on the fetching of 1 million rows before it can process the totals.

Answer 2

I recall that earlier version of CR support the notion of a shared repository in addition to the repository that is available via BusinessObjects (nee Crystal Decisions) Enterprise.

I haven't found any mention of similar functionality (meaning a shared, non-BOE repository) in version XI+.