Crystal Reports Administration: Document and Troubleshoot Your Reports

If you've worked at all with ISO9000 or other quality initiatives, you know "documentation is everything." Yet, many Crystal Reports administrators neglect documenting their own reports or report design processes. This is a dangerous game to play.

Here's a typical scenario. You've busted your butt to create outstanding reports. But, you know IT jobs are going overseas and you know yours could be next--especially if anyone complains about problems with your reports. You need to be able to show your management proof that you are doing such outstanding work that they'd be fools to commoditize your job and ship it overseas.

You also need to document your reports for your own peace of mind and the ability to head off bad hair days before they begin.

What's the solution? It's really quite simple. Document your reports with Report Analyzer.

Cortex Systems has created an excellent report documentation tool. We  regard it as indispensable for anyone who needs to provide professional report documentation. We are so impressed with it, we have added it to our stable of offerings.

Report Analyzer can save you megahours of troubleshooting. It also helps with report design, by bulk documentation of reports. Report Analyzer automatically detects potential performance issues in your Crystal Report design settings--including record selection formulas, grouping options and database options.

 With this powerful program, you can:

• Improve report reliability and maintenance. Analyzer documents over 30 design and style settings.

• Speed development and maintenance. You can easily view dependencies between Crystal Report objects such as formulas, SQL expression fields, parameters and database fields--with the dependency viewer. Additionally, the powerful query feature lets you view dependency information across reporting projects.

• Manage projects better. Analyzer generates comprehensive documentation of your Crystal Reports, with over 100 presentation quality reports. Complexity metrics assist with test case planning and maintenance estimates.

If you are doing many reports, or if your reports reach important people, you can't afford to poke around in the dark. Buy Report Analyzer, and you won't have to.

Let's take a closer look at what Report Analyzer for Crystal Reports allows you to do:

• Automatically detect reports that do not take advantage of server side database processing.
• Detect record selection formulas which use data type conversion functions.
• Detect group fields which use formulas instead of SQL Expression fields.
• Find report tables which use less than an optimal number of fields.
• Discover special fields which cause an additional pass over the report data source.
• Plus more

 Improve report reliability and reduce maintenance effort

• Discover unused Formulas, Fields, and Variables.
• Identify group settings which cause blank pages and footers.
• Identify missing standard Crystal documentation best practices (Report Title, Author, Description special fields).
• Locate reports which may use the "Convert null field to default" setting inconsistently.
• Keep versions of your documented reports for historical comparison.
• Plus more

 Speed development and maintenance

• View report designs in a design window similar to the one in the Crystal Reports designer program.
• Select design objects and view/print settings, formula code (including conditional formatting formulas), dependencies with other design objects, and call stacks (for formulas only).
• Use interactive diagrams (trees) of formula hierarchies, object dependencies and report design elements.
• Query and print over 600 report settings across all documented reports. Perform instant impact assessment for database changes and formula changes across all documented reports.
• Locate which reports use specific functions, parameters, and design settings.
• Plus more

Improve Project Management

• Generate summary and detailed documentation.
• Analyze report complexity metrics to assist with test plan development and maintenance planning.
• Easy to use documentation explorer to browse and compare report design settings.
• Print report design diagrams.
• Print report data dictionaries.
• Extensive formula printouts including call trees, object cross references, formatted listing, and conditional formulas.
• All documentation can be exported in a variety of formats including PDF, HTML and Word.
• Uses Crystal Reports to produce the documentation, enabling complete customization
• Plus more!

For pricing and/or purchase, click here.

This article is copyrighted by Crystalkeen, Mindconnection, and Chelsea Technologies Ltd. It may be freely copied and distributed as long as the original copyright is displayed and no modifications are made to this material. Extracts are permitted. The names Crystal Reports and Seagate Info are trademarks owned by Business Objects.