cView: Web vs. Windows

Whether to deliver Crystal Reports from the Web or from the Windows desktop can be a confusing decision--or appear that way. Some people have a hard time understanding how it really makes any difference. As our outstanding cView product is a Windows-based viewer, we feel compelled to explain.

You can export your report manually--or with a scheduler like cViewMANAGER or cViewSERVER--to HTML or PDF. You can save these documents on your Web server. However, users viewing these reports are viewing static Web pages.

If you store (save or copy to) your reports (*.rpt files) on a Web server, those reports appear as documents just like other HTML pages (or they appear as PDF documents). Reports can be saved with or without the data. You can download these rpt files to your local workstation, but can view them only if you have a Crystal Reports viewer installed on your machine.

With Windows report delivery, a report saved without data is perfectly fine for cView users. But in a Web interface, a report without data is of no use to cView users. They can load the report, but because they cannot connect to the database, they cannot process any results.

Interactive Web reports require a Web delivery mechanism. Web delivered reports are available using Crystal Enterprise or a third party tool like Recrystallize.

If the reports have saved data, there is a free viewer available from the Website the CR install sets up. The big catch is it works only with reports with saved data. This is problematic. A justification for using CR to begin with is avoiding islands of information.

But when you save data with a report, you create an island of information. That means your report is a snapshot of the past, not a live report with current information. And it can easily differ from a report that another person is viewing, though both users may think they are looking at the same report.

The free viewer is useful for viewing archive reports with saved data. And that free viewer thus gets you back into the island of information problem.

If you want a Web-based system, you should consider Recrystallize. If that won't meet your needs, then you should talk to Crystal Decisions about a more complex solution--and be prepared to spend some money.

cView offer Windows report delivery for people on the local network. Web users have a totally different set of operational requirements, restrictions, and security requirements.

These two approaches are fundamentally different. If you are looking for a Web-based solution, cView is not it. But for a Windows-based solution, nothing else even comes close.