Crystal Reports 2010 and activex report viewer.

[Former Member]

I have an application built using VS 2010, and the matching crystal reports. However, the application includes legacy VB 6 components, and they are also used to generate reports.

Up until now everything has been fine, and the setup kits we build distribute the single crystal runtime required. Now I have discovered that CR 2010 does not allow us to distribute the activex viewer, crviewer.dll, and it isn't installed with the runtime.

I have spent a huge amount of time updating the vb6 projects to reference crviewer.dll version 13, since it is supplied with Crystal for VS 2010, only to find out that we are not allowed to use it

If we're not allowed to distribute it, and the runtime doesn't install it, why do we have it?

What workaround can anybody suggest? I don't really want to have to distribute 2 runtimes (2008 and 2010), and I don't want to have to undo all the changes I've made to the vb6 stuff (this really is write-only code).

[former_member183750 · Accepted solution]

Unfortunately, the answer I have for you is most likely one that you do not want;

Lots and lots of info on the RDC and VB6 and .NET on this web site (use the search box in the top right corner of this web page). There are KBs, Wikis and Blogs that I personally created. In a nut shell, the RDC was retired in version CR XI R2 (11.5). E.g.; two versions ago. While you will find the crxddrt.dll and crviewer.dll included with CRVS2010, these are for internal purposes and you are not licensed to use these (craxddrt.dll was a special license only in any version of CR). Your only option is to rewrite the code using the CR .NET SDK. As for the resources available on this website. See the following small sample;

Ludek

Follow us on Twitter http://twitter.com/SAPCRNetSup

Got Enhancement ideas? Try the [SAP Idea Place|https://ideas.sap.com/community/products_and_solutions/crystalreports]

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Thanks, Ludek, for your quick response. While I understand what sap are doing, it is going to cause some grumbling wtih our clients. I have already added cr 2008 as a prerequisite to our setup kits, and while it doesn't worry me, surely there must be a large number of developers who are supporting legacy vb6 components alongside .net components, and will face this problem. Is there a reason why crviewer.dll version 13 is not licensed for use?

Thanks for claryfing this.

Nick.

[former_member183750 · Accepted solution]

Hello Nick

It is a good question and one that has a long history:

I think it was early 2000s that Microsoft came out with the idea of getting rid of COM in favor of .NET. So we (Crystal, or was it Business Objects(?), at that time) decided to follow suit. By mid 2000 Microsoft decided to change their minds so COM still exists. Unfortunately, we were too far gone down the road of .NET and Java SDK only so COM was retired. My suspicion - and this is a personal view, is that this decision was also made in part so that we'd limit the development of all the different SDKs; COM, WIN APIs, .NET, Java. And admittedly It is a lot of work maintaining all of those SDKs.

At this time, using the COM SDK results in two issues; licensing and runtime deployment. Even if you'd gloss over the licensing, there is no way to deploy the COM runtime successfully anymore.

Umm, not to be difficult or mean or anything, but there has been a lot of info re the retirement and life cycle of the RDC (COM) SDK. I actually wrote a blog on this in October 2008 ([Report Designer Component - Past, Present & Future

|https://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/sdn/weblogs?blog=/pub/wlg/11624] [original link is broken] [original link is broken]; and way before that there was the [Crystal Reports Report Designer Component - Statement of Direction|http://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/sdn/go/portal/prtroot/docs/library/uuid/80bd35e5-c71d-2b10-4593-d09907d95289] article published on March 2, 2006.

And COM has really died down (at least as far as CR is concerned). On the forums, the Legacy forum has had just over 500 threads this year (not all of them COM). The NET forums have had around 5000 threads.

This is longer than I wanted it to be, but it does explain things a bit

Have a great weekend,

- Ludek

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Hi Ludek,

I get what you're saying. I don't really browse the forums unless I have a problem, but there you go...

Thanks again for you response.

Nick.