The Share UFL is a Crystal Reports User Function Library that lets you save and retrieve data between reports

A share file is a simple xml file, and you can use this document format with other applications including InfoPath, SQL Server, or even a text editor. The trial version has a limit of 10 values per share file. The full version currently has a limit of 1000 values, but this can be increased if you want more.

• Use the ShareTagSave function in one report to save the data in a "Share File".
• Then in another report use the ShareTagFetch to use that value in your new report.

A couple of neat tricks:

1. The Share UFL can vastly improve Crystal Reports performance. For example, when using a subreport in the details section to calculate a summary from a large transaction table for the product in that section, the Share UFL can let you run the subreport only once instead of several thousand times.
2. When you need to carry a balance forward from one Crystal Report to another, the Share UFL enables you to do that.

And, there are many more ways to use the Share UFL to put your Crystal Reports system on steroids.

We have received requests in the past asking how to use value from one report in a second report. The usual answer is to repeat the database processing in a subreport inside the second report. This is highly inefficient of course, and hits major limitations if there are values needed from more than one report in a later report.

Another solution to this is to calculate the totals in some summary tables, and use them there. That's fine if SQL functions will do what you want, but the values could be more complex than some simple SQL functions.

In the past, we made this possible via using our Disk Output and Text Lookup User Function Libraries: write the values to a disk file using the DiskLinesEntry function, and retrieve it with the TextLookupCell function.

We decided to combine these into an easy-to-use User Function Library that you can access under �Functions� in your Formula Explorer.

This new UFL is called the Share UFL. You create a Share file and a tag for the value you want to save with the ShareTagStore function:

WhilePrintingRecords; ShareTagStore(c:\Reports\Data\Finance.xml,
Balance, ToText(Sum({Table.Amount}));

Retrieve the value in another report with:

WhilePrintingRecords;
ShareTagFetch(c:\Reports\Data\Finance.xml,Balance)

You can use multiple Share files in one report, and in the full version up to 1000 different tags for the values you want to save.