Distribute Crystal Runtime engine DLLs instead of installing the whole runtime engine via setup

[Former Member]

Hi there,

In our application we use Crystal Reports. We have included the following references in order to view reports and export reports as pdf:

- CrystalDecisions.CrystalReports.Engine

- CrystalDecisions.Shared

- ChristalDecisions.Windows.Forms

In order to correctly export reports a.o. these 3 references need the crystal runtime engine ("SAP Crystal Reports runtime engine for .NET Framework") to be installed.

My question: is it possible to directly distribute all the required DLLs of this runtime engine within our application (single DLL files) so that there is no need of installing the runtime engine on each machine where the report should be exported? That would be good for our customers, because the setup process would be much more simple if the crystal runtime engine did not have to be installed additinally.

I'm looking forward to your response.

[former_member11696 · Accepted solution]

Hi Andreas,

Welcome to DLL Hell", Short answer is NO, CR runtime is COM based and also requires a lot of registration keys being created and Assemblies GAC'd in the Assembly cache. Even though you are using just those 3 they have dependencies on all of the other ones.

If you really want to, completely not supported though, is look at the install log and see what the installer is doing and you can replicate the steps...

But if anything doesn't work nothing we can do to help.

It's just easier to use the MSI and avoid "DLL Hell".

Don