Crystal Reports-Universe and Business Views. Pros & cons. BVs to Universe

[Former Member]

Hi Gurus,

We have around 500 + Crystal Reports developed on top of Business Views, Stored Procedures, Command Objects and some directly connected to the tables. No Universes are there in our current environment and all reports undergo frequent changes.

We are planning to replace Business Views with Universe and use them as data provider for existing Crystal Reports and also planning to do some ad-hoc reporting using Web-Intelligence. I have expertise in developing both Crystal Reports and Web Intelligence reports. But I never designed any complex Crystal Reports against Universe / Business Views. I heard that there are several issues with Crystal against Universe (e.g.: Cascading Prompts, LOVs, Row Level Security etc...) Most of our Crystal Reports have several sub-reports and some dynamic cascading parameters.

We currently have not finalized any tool. Some are advising not to disturb the current environment and some say migrating to Universe is a good option because Business View manager tool is going to be trashed in few years. My personal view is to used both Crystal and Web-I and replace Business Views with Universe because we can use it for both Crystal and Web-I.

Can you please post your views on this?

Also, please post the issues (& solutions) you got with Crystal Reports against Universe. Also advantages and disadvantages of using Universe over Business Views.

Environment: Business Objects XI R2 and Crystal Reports XI R2

Any help is greatly appreciated!

Many thanks,

Shamanth.

[PPaolo]

Hello,

you can find an article about Crystal Reports on Universe here:

http://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/boc/index?rid=/library/uuid/20984c2b-17f1-2b10-1091-d18977f7cd8f

As you said, an important item to consider is reusability: if you want to reuse your work between Crystal and WebI then you have to go with Universes. If you are ok in keeping the two in separate worlds then Business Views can still bring a lot of value to CR. Business views will stay in the market still for a long time (in mainteinance, so don't expect new features).

Looking at the future, we expect that In the long term, business views will be replaced by universes. Keeping this in mind, a migration of a report from an 'older' version of a universe to a new one will probably go smoother than a migration from a business view to a universe.

Hope that it helps

PPaolo

Edited by: Pierpaolo Vezzosi on Jan 5, 2010 11:35 AM

[Former Member]

Thank you Pierpaolo. Now it is 'Crystal' clear for me..

Edited by: Shamanthreddy on Jan 5, 2010 4:37 PM

Edited by: Shamanthreddy on Jan 5, 2010 4:38 PM