We are having issues with coexistance of Crystal Reports v.8 and Crystal Reports v.13.0.5

[Former Member]

One of our customers has two versions of our product installed side-by-side.

The older version is using Crystal Reports v.8 and the newer version of our product is using Crystal Reports v. 13.0.5.

When the new version got installed on the machine, the older version of the Crystal Reports is no longer working.

Can you please suggest what is the work around for this?

[former_member11696 · Accepted solution]

Correct, almost. CR 2011 is version 4.0, CR 2013 and 2016 are the same version 4.1 and 4.2 and cannot be installed on the same PC. They get installed into the same folder structure as CR 2011, they all have 4.0 in the path.

So you cannot have those CR's on the same PC.

You can have CR 9 to CR 2008 and either CR 2011, 2013 or 2016 on the same PC.

Don

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Thanks Don.

Thank you for the clarification.

Regards,

Aziz

[former_member11696]

Not what I said... Same as what is in the description below:

SAP Crystal Reports 2016, 2013 and 2011 cannot be installed on the same computer, because SAP Crystal Reports 2016 and 2013 are minor release of SAP Crystal Reports 2011

[former_member11696]

Crystal Reports 8.5 was the last version that did not support side by side installs. Meaning you could only have one version on the same PC.

The reason was back then we copied some of our runtime into the c:\windows\system32 folder. You can no longer do that unless allowed by MS.

Because the core engine, crpe32.dll is in the system 32 folder it typically gets loaded first and that starts the problems.... Then it looks in c:\windows\crystal folder and starts loading all of the wrong DB drivers.

Bottom line is it will not work and never will work, too many files with the same name.

Only option is to uninstall the CR for VS 13.0.5 on that PC and install it on a separate one.

Since CR 9 you could have side by side installs because we hard coded the locations and each version has a unique path.

Also, 13.0.5 is SP 5, we are up to SP 18 and SP 19 in a month, time to upgrade, lot's of new features...

Don

[Former Member]

Thanks Don.

I read a knowledge base article on sap.com.

https://apps.support.sap.com/sap/support/knowledge/public/en/1216278

According to this article:

Side-by-side installation of different major release version of Crystal Reports designer is supported since Crystal Reports 9, because each major release version installs the software in different directory. SAP Crystal Reports 2016, 2013 and 2011 cannot be installed on the same computer, because SAP Crystal Reports 2016 and 2013 are minor release of SAP Crystal Reports 2011. You need to install the product update on top of SAP Crystal Reports 2011 to update the product to SAP Crystal Reports 2013, or you need to uninstall the previous version and install the newest minor version. This side-by-side behavior applies to Crystal Reports and the various Software Development Kits (SDKs). However, Visual Studio integration is not side by side; only one version of Crystal Reports can be integrated into the Visual Studio .NET IDE at any given time.

However, from your post, what I understand is that it is possible to install SAP Crystal Reports 2016, 2013 and 2011 on the same computer. Please clarify.

Regards,

Aziz

[DellSC]

All of the underpinnings of the Crystal SDK are COM objects. I suspect that the two versions of the SDK are using one or more objects that have the same name and GUID in the registry that are actually very different sets of code and that is what is causing this issue.

Unfortunately, I don't think there is any solution other than to run two versions on different machines. Crystal 8 is over 17 years old and is long out of support. It was also never designed to run on more modern operating systems.

-Dell