Crystal Reports: Instances

The concept of an instance is borrowed from the days of Seagate Info. Essentially, it is a report with saved data. It's a snapshot of the data at a specific point of time--at a specific instant. Thus, "instance."

Saving a report with data is not normally advisable, because as soon as you save that report, it is outdated. But now you have two versions of your data at the same time--which means you may have conflicting information. Saving reports with data creates a problem called "islands of information." And those can be very costly.

So unless you have a specific reason for saving a snapshot of the data--for example, you want to report last quarter's earnings and have made sure the books are closed so the data underlying the report are the same as the what you have in the database--don't save the data with the report. If you do save the data with the report, make sure the report is clearly marked to that effect.

Now, understand that simply wanting to give a snapshot of last quarter's earnings doesn't automatically justify sending data across the network (and loading it down) along with the report. It's much more efficient (and safer, in case the books are adjusted without your knowledge) to simply define the date parameters in the report or in the query upon which the report is based.

If you are using a third-party report viewer, such as cView, you should design and save the report without data. That's because when you view a report, cView does not automatically refresh until you ask it to. This default behavior eliminates unnecessary calls to your server.

Use the "Instance Settings" to decide where the instances are stored. By default this is the \Instances folder inside the cView program folder. But with sites with multiple users, you might like to point it at a network drive and folder.

Select the report using cView, and process it. If you have the View set to "Folder" you can see multiple reports in the folder. So if you select a report, and click the "Instance" button, the report will run and be saved with data into the Instance folder.

The instance name includes a date stamp and the name of the original report. Multiple instances of the same report on the same day have an a/b/c code.

The view the instances in the folder, change the View setting to "Instances" and then click on a rpt file to view the historical data.

Make sure you are using the latest version of cView, to optimize the entire process.

Not sure where your instances are, what's original, and what's duplicated? Is your system so tangled up with information silos, information caches, and embedded data that just describing the problem is a strain? We have a solution.

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And it will definitely help you improve your reporting system reliability. Report Analyzer documents over 30 design and style settings.

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.