Migrate from BO XI 3.1 to BI platform 4.1 crystalreportsviewer

[former_member367418]

We are currently running BOXI 3.1, and part of our web app integration is to run Crystal reports via URL reporting (passing login token and parameters).

Crystalreports.war is deployed on each of the Tomcat servers hosting our web app.

I want to do the equivalent with a viewer package from BI platform 4.1, but I am having problems.

There is no longer a packaged war just for the Crystal report viewer, that functionality seems to be in the BOE.war now.

Deploying BOE.war (created with wdeploy flags -Ddisable_CmcApp=true -Ddisable_InfoView=true) is not an option as the war file is too huge, around 1 GB in size.

The dev guides mention that for the viewers, Opendocument should be used now, so I've attempted to create a BOE.war that just has Opendocument, with the wdeploy tool, predeploy option.

This was done by using wdeploy config files to point to my own copies of the workdir, and source directory for BOE.

After that, I removed a list of jar files from the directory that wdeploy iterates through when packaging: \BOE\WEB-INF\eclipse\plugins

The intent of that was to include only those war files in the plugins directory that Opendocument needs.

In testing, Opendocument will run a report request - but only finishes after around 10 minutes of waiting - obviously something is wrong, but I haven't found any clues in the logs I am looking in.

Am I going about this in the wrong way? - or is there another way to create a war file from BI platform 4.1 that only includes a report viewer for URL Reporting/Opendocument?

Thanks

[former_member367418]

Update on this - I was able to get the report viewer running better than before by using the same commands I was using previously with URL reporting in BOXI R3.1

What was helpful is this document: http://help.sap.com/businessobject/product_guides/boexir4/en/xi4sp2_cr_url_reporting_en.pdf

In section 1.2.1 is given the new URL path for Crystal Reports URL Reporting web application:

http://<servername>:<port>/BOE/CrystalReports/viewrpt.cwr

Now I have Two issues that I need to solve:

1.  Report export to PDF fails.  It results in a file that can't be opened in a PDF viewer. Adobe viewer gives an error "it is either not a supported file type or because the file has been damaged".

2.  Report export to Excel fails.  Some of the files that can be opened in Excel show corrupted text among the rows that can be seen.

This happens with both of the BOE.war packages I created (described in the first post; one created with the CMC and infoview app flags off, the other created with those same flags, as well as some jar files removed from the Eclipse plugins directory to reduce the size of the BOE.war file).

_____________________________

For Reference, here are the steps I did to create the reduced size BOE.war file:

On the BI Platform server:

1. Changed the wdeploy config file to output in my own directory, and also point to a different source directory.

  file: \SAP BusinessObjects\SAP BusinessObjects Enterprise XI 4.0\wdeploy\conf\wdeploy.conf

  Added:  work_dir=D:\cm\workdir2

          app_source_tree=D:\cm\webapps

2. Copied  \SAP BusinessObjects\SAP BusinessObjects Enterprise XI 4.0\warfiles\webapps\BOE

  to the D:\cm\webapps directory, and also copied the two jar files found in the parent dir of BOE to D:\cm\webapps

3. Deleted a list of jar files in d:\cm\webapps\BOE\WEB-INF\eclipse\plugins

  I have attached a text document that shows what I deleted and what I kept.

4. Ran wdeploy with the command line:  wdeploy tomcat7 -Ddisable_CmcApp=true -Ddisable_InfoView=true -DAPP=BOE predeploy

jarlistDeletesbuild5.txt.zip

[DellSC]

I would try using OpenDocument instead of crviewer to see if that will give you the correct exports.  You can find the OpenDocument documentation in the same place that you found the crviewer docs.

-Dell

[former_member367418]

Hi Dell,

Thanks for the reply.

I get the same result calling OpenDocument and exporting PDF and Excel, resulting in unreadable files.  Additionally, I get the hanging behavior of the Browser waiting around 4 to 5 minutes on any report request.  This is the same behavior I described in the first post, which is why I tried using the viewrpt.cwr call which doesn't have that behavior.  

It kind of seems I am missing some components used in the export process on my viewer package, but right now it is not obvious as no errors are being thrown that I can find.

[DellSC]

I wouldn't include the viewer in your application.  Instead, I would call it from the server where BI Launchpad and the CMC are running, go to http://<boe web server>:8080/OpenDocument...

-Dell