Explanation

For support purposes, it is desirable to know the source of any report and whether that report is one of the Cyrious standard reports or a customized report that was developed for a specific user. While Crystal Reports supports pulling the file name and location of the RPT file, this is not helpful in determining this because:

  • System Reports are stored in the database. Control exports them to a temp file as the first step in the printing process.
  • Custom Reports may be named the same as the standard reports.

In order to provide this information, a mechanism was built into Control to inject text into the report identifying the source of the report.

Information Inserted

The information inserted will consists of one of the following:

  • SYSTEM\ + the standard report name.
  • The file path and name where the report is stored.Note: The location where the report is stored is not normally the location it is printed from. Crystal Reports has (or had) a bug in which when mutliple users would print simultaneously using the same report, it would error out. To avoid this problem, Control copies the report to the users own temporary file folder and prints from there. Even so, the original location will be used in the report.

Configuration

During the translation scan, Control looks for the exact text “SYSTEMREPORTFLAG” in the hint of each label. If it finds this in the formla, it replaces the text of the label with the Report Source.

To create this in Crystal Reports, execute the following steps:

  • Add a text label to the bottom of the form (this is often in the page footer).
  • You may enter any placeholder text you like, it will be replaced.
  • Right-click the label and select Format Text … A dialog box will appear.
  • Click on the Formula icon to the right of the ToolTip edit box.
  • Enter the following text, including the quotation marks: “SYSTEMREPORTFLAG”
  • Click Save and Close, then OK to close the dialog box.

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