Do Merge Modules for CR correspond to a private installation of CR

[Former Member]

I am about to ship an ASP.NET app to a client, which uses CR for VS 2008 extensively. My original plan was to ship 2 separate installers, one for my app, and the other the CR MSI package.

However, the client is already running some apps on his server and needs to be assured that CR installation would not break anything?

What he wants is a kind of private installation of CR for my app only, so that other apps cannot access or are affected by CR installation. Here's what the CR download page for VS says about Merge modules:

"In addition, the MSI packages let you deploy Crystal Reports only once on the target computer and support any number of applications, without having to embed it in each applicationu2019s setup separately."

This makes me believe that if I include the CR merge modules for my app setup, CR would be installed and available for my app only. But I am not sure about this. So, my questions are:

1) Is the above observation regarding merge modules true?

2) If yes, do installation using Merge modules put CR in its default Program Files directory only, or do Merge modules get installed to the same directory as would be chosen at installation time for my app??

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Hi r_honey,

1) ur observation is not true. The matter on the cr download page means the following.

If you run the msi for say cr xir2 on a machine. Then you can deploy any number of applications that target

crxir2 runtimes on that machine.

The advantage of using merge modules is that you can combine the crystal runtimes and your application into a single

exe or msi setup package unlike crystal runtime msi installers which need to be run (also need to put keycode) first on the target machine followed by running the installer for your application.

2) Whether you use the msi installer or merge modules, the dlls(runtimes) get installed in the GAC or in c:\windows\assembly folder and they will be used by any application that needs to use those dlls, not restricted to any one application. The dlls are also placed in some folder within the installation directory i.e Program files\Business Objects.

On a personal note i would recommend sticking to msi installers as there are a lot of issues with merge modules especially while deploying cr2008 applications.

Does the above help?

DDCRDev..

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Hi DDCRDev, so I should take that to mean that Merge modules apart from allowing to integrate CR installation with your app's installer does not affect the installation process for CR any other way??

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Hi r_honey,

No.

Only way merge module affects a cr installation or is different from running crystal msi is that you enter the keycode for the merge module at the time of creating a setup project in Visual Studio.

Assemblies installed by mergemodule are the same as those installed by the msi. They can be shared by multiple applications.

regards,

DDCRDev..

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Hi DDRCRDev, thanks for the reply...

[former_member188030]

Hello,

For the deployment details regarding the crystal Reports.Net application refer the

'Crystal Reports.Net SDK Developer Guide' here:

[http://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/boc/sdklibrary#section7|http://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/boc/sdklibrary#section7]

Refer to the 'Deployment' Section.

Thanks,

Bhushan.