crystal reports

Having fought with Crystal Reports Server XI for a while now, I've installed it no less than four times. One of those times it inexplicably failed to work. I then unpacked the very same virtual machine and installed it into the same VM on which it failed to work at all after installation, and it worked. So before I even get into this article my first tip is "if it appears that it should work after your install, and it doesn't, wipe the system and try again."

Aristocrat OASIS' stored procedures require some input in order to function properly. The most important elements to understand are the date specification, the iLockKey value, and the iApplication_ID.

Rules for Player Reports

(Adapted from Beginning Crystal Reports v.6.0 Guidebook, Aristocrat Technologies, 2002.)

When I wrote this document, there was no way to just look up the information in the tutorial documentation (or anything else) on the Aristocrat website.

Mailing Address construction:

First Line:

{CDS_ACCOUNT.Address1a}

Second Line:

{CDS_ACCOUNT.City1} + ', ' + {CDS_ACCOUNT.State1} + ' ' + {CDS_ACCOUNT.Zip1}

Given that Crystal has no array-sorting functions, there is often a need to write one. An insertion sort is the most efficient of the particularly simple and short sort algorithms, working well with short sets, whether they are already substantially sorted or not.

Crystal Reports 9 provides no way to sort an array. If you want to calculate the median value for an array, it must be sorted. On the other hand, it does provide comparisons that work properly based on data type, so that for example ( "Alice" < "Bethany" ) will evaluate true. The following examples are designed to sort numerical arrays but they can as easily sort strings or any other data types in Crystal.

Among the many pieces of obvious functionality missing from Crystal is a median function that will operate on an array. The median is not horribly difficult to calculate, but in order to do so you need a sorted list of values. Another obvious thing Crystal is missing is an array sort function. The median of a list is its middle value by position such that of the set (1, 3, 3, 4, 6) the median is 3 while the average is 3.4. While it does not look very useful with a short set of only five elements, it is often useful when you have one or two hundred of them. It is often much more useful than an average when you have a lot of redundancy in your set.

(Converting a bunch of Seconds to something Useful)

A lot of databases store time elapsed as a number of seconds. This is sufficiently granular for most purposes and it is programatically a lot easier than storing day, hour, minute, second and so on values.

When it comes time to introduce a human to that data, the big number of seconds isn't going to mean diddly. The following example is from a report on Aristocrat OASIS, so otherwise you will need to assign the "Local NumberVar TP" at the top of the example from another report source.

Crystal Reports 9 allows you to create a median summary field, but not to get the median for an array. Sure, you can get an average, or a mean, but not a median. If you want the median of a list of values, they must first be in order, which is outside the scope of this document (but there are other documents on sorting arrays.)

Crystal reports processes different parts of the report in a fixed order that one must understand [to some degree] to understand what you can't do in Crystal.