Generate and Show with Only One Button In Crystal Report

[abdullah123456789]

Hello,

I generate report with using Crystal Report in Geo SCADA. I created a page and added three buttons in this page. One of this button is Generate button and the one of is Show button and the other is Refresh button. I've designed this page like this because sometimes the generate time can take a long time so since the current report has not been prepared yet, the displayed report may belong to the previous one. By using the Refresh button, I can also confirm whether the desired report has been prepared by seeing the latest movements on the list I have created.

However i need to generate and show the report i've created with only one button. In this way, I will no longer need the refresh button and the list. Is it possible for me to solve this situation I mentioned with a script or another way? Can you help me?

[AndrewScott]

Generating a report is asynchronous so you would have to poll the server to detect when the report has started and completed generating before displaying the report.

The CCrystalReport::Status (0 = idle, 1 = failed, 2 = pending, 3 = in-progress) and CCrystalReport::DataTimestamp (time of last status change) database fields could be read by a script to monitor the progress of the report generation. As this is polled you would need to use the timestamp to handle missing state transitions between polls.

You could also animate the CCrystalReport::StatusDesc and CCrystalReport::DataTimestamp properties on the mimic rather than having an event list which you have to manually refresh to see the status of the report.

[BevanWeiss]

As Andrew said...

But also... do you need to have the view of the report within the ViewX at this particular time?

Perhaps if the user instead could enter in their email address and then push the button it could export the report in PDF and email them when the report is generated.

You can do this using the standard export systems around the Crystal Reports.  You'd just need some logic to take in the email address, and allow for the changing of the Report properties to include the email in the export settings.

[abdullah123456789]

Unfortunately, exporting the report as pdf or sending it to e-mail is not something that will solve my problem completely. When the created button is pressed, the desired report should be created and displayed within a few seconds at most, and it should do this in ViewX.

[BevanWeiss]

As the Crystal Reports generation is asynchronous to operator actions, then you'd need to do as Andrew suggests and have some script do polling type actions on it.

This would result in a very bad user experience.  You'd need to have them push the button, and then indicate that the system is 'thinking' by changing the mouse cursor or something.  Try to get them not to push other buttons or such, whilst the script is running in the background.  Then you could have the script do a navigate to view the report once it's ready.

I think you'd get complaints from the users about it appearing to freeze, and weird stuff if they click other things, or it not working if they navigate away and back again, etc, etc..

You could potentially look into an alternative reporting framework, like Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services, or PowerBI or something more user-centric than purely report-centric.  Crystal Reports is really best as a behind the scenes scheduled report engine.  Whilst it can do on-demand reports, its UI experience around this isn't very nice (and the ViewX-Crystal Reports interface hasn't been designed to really support this on-demand reporting from Crystal Reports either).