|
|
Crystal Reports:
Document Conditional Formatting
If you use Export/Report Definition, you will find that
if you are using conditional formatting formulas, the fields will have a
section labeled “Adornment Formulas” and all the conditional formatting
formulas listed there.
Sadly, there is no documentation of the highlighting
formatting used in the report.
What's the problem with this? Well, if the CEO calls
down to your boss all upset because the report is obviously providing
wrong information and high-level executives are going to be presenting
to a major client in an hour, you are on the hot seat.
Situations far less dramatic than that can also sully
your reputation and/or cost your company business. And, of course, the
last thing you want is for people to lose confidence in your reporting
system.
But how are you supposed to find the errant conditional
formatting formulas, and how are you supposed to find other needles in
this particular haystack?
|
| The answer is Report Analyzer.
Report
Analyzer for Crystal Reports allows you to document your Crystal
Reports--extensively, quickly, and efficiently. Not only that, the results
are usable.
Report Analyzer automatically detects potential
performance issues in your Crystal Report design settings--including
record selection formulas, grouping options, and database options--and
that's just the start.
|
Report
Analyzer for Crystal Reports |
|
You may not even be aware of existing errors that
create problems such as these:
- Suck down bandwidth and cause your network to
crawl.
- Render odd results in reports, undermining
confidence in the system--and in you.
- Frustrate users, who respond by creating islands
of information in spreadsheets.
In addition to troubleshooting costly performance
issues, you need a report analyzer to help you:
- Document settings and formulas, for ease of
admin.
- Quickly locate and re-use information, so you
don't have to re-invent the wheel.
- Identify and remove unused fields, formulas, and
other components that simply waste resources.
- Diagram your reports, so you quickly see exactly
what's going on.
- View dependencies between objects, reducing
development time.
Report Analyzer
for Crystal Reports allows you to:
Improve report performance
- 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.
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.
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.
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.
|
