Mar 20 2007

By default Emerald V5 uses HTML based template files for all reporting and printing. Due to a licensing restrictions from Business Objects (where the Crystal Reports print engine can not be distributed with a web application unless you pay an additional amount of money per-installation), we can not distribute the Crystal Reports Print Engine in Emerald V5.

However V5 still supports Crystal reports for printing if you have Crystal Reports installed on your Emerald server. You must first set "Enable Crystal Reports Print Engine" to Yes in the Emerald Admin, Reports and Logs, Settings section and restart the Emerald Web service.

Once this option is set to yes, if Emerald can initialize the Crystal Reports engine and you define a .rpt file for the action you are using, that report file will be used instead of the default ews template.

Possible options for obtaining and install Crystal Reports on your Emerald Web Server include:

1) Install the CR11 demo on your Emerald Server. Although the
editor does expire in 30 days, the engine will continue to
work fine.

2) Install the Emerprint applications on your server. It includes
the CR9 print engine and will allow Emerald to work with Crystal
reports. The URL is:

http://www.iea-software.com/ftp/EmeraldV4/WinNT/emerprint_cr9.exe

You can't actually use the V4 Emerprint with V5, but it will give
you the engine you need.

3) Install any other full version of Crystal Reports from 9.0 or higher,
as along as it is the professional edition. The Standard edition of
CR does not support ODBC sources.

In all cases, you will need to reboot your server, so that the Services
enviromental path is updated to include the directory to the CR print
engine (the installers do that for you). If you are still having problems, please make sure that the bin directory for your version of Crystal Reports is in the SYSTEM enviroment path. This varies for different versions of Crystal Reports, but can be one of:

c:\program files\common files\crystal decisions\2.0\bin

c:\program files\common files\business objects\3.0\bin

You may use either option (.ews or .rpt) for any report or email file defined in Emerald. The system will automatically use the correct extension for the file based on whether the Crystal Reports and Emerald Print Engine is enabled.

We do not have any way of converting CR .rpt files to .ews templates.