What role does the printer play in rendering Crystal Reports in different scenarios?

Hi,

I work with a website that uses Crystal Reports SDK that is included in the Business Objects Platform .NET SDK to display reports in a CrystalReportViewer control. We currently use Business Objects to store our reports, but I was tasked with determining whether or not we could achieve the same efficiency by moving the reports to our web server.

In testing the loading of the reports from the web servers, I noticed that some reports took a long time to load and display on the web page. When I investigated these reports, they all opened with the message "This report uses an invalid printer. The default printer will be used instead." This obviously told me that there was an issue with the printer associated with the report. I found THIS article that also describes my situation. When I added a check mark to the No Printer (optimize for screen display) check box in Page Setup, and saved the report, the reports run just as fast as they did from Business Objects.

The interesting thing to me is that I don't experience the slowness when I load the report from Business Objects, so it made me wonder how printers are handled in Business Objects, which led to the following questions:

1. Does Business Objects just immediately ignore the printer and use the default printer on the Business Objects server?
2. Is there a property that can be set in Crystal Reports SDK that will force it to handle printers in the same manner as Business Objects?
3. Just to confirm, if a default printer is set in the report to something like Microsoft XPS Document Writer or Adobe PDF and the end user doesn't have either on her/his machine, the report will use the user's default printer, correct?

Additional info:

• Business Objects BI Platform .NET SDK
• Crystal Reports version 14.1.1.1036
• Visual Studio 2015
• Client: Windows 10
• Server: Windows Server 2012 r2

Thanks.