Saved background does not stay saved with report.

[Former Member]

I am still using Crystal 8.5 with VB 6.0 SP6 (Don't laugh).

I am trying my hand at doing a scanned pre-printed form for invoicing in my A/R system.  After wrestling with issue after issue, most of which were solved with a bit of creative googling, I seem to have hit one final brick wall.  The invoice is perfect.  But when I save the report, and then either attempt to access the report from within my VB application OR re-load Crystal, the scanned form image is not there, only an empty OLE container (in Crystal).  Also, I noticed that the .Rpt file is a whopping 32 MB in size.  My first obstacle to over come -might- also be the cause of my final unresolved issue.  I now get that you need to edit your picture in PC Paint or some other program, NOT in Crystal.  I was only resizing in Crystal, but apparently that was enough for me to get very strange results - it only half-worked and would often tell me that the page header plus footer was too big (page footer was both set to minimum AND suppressed).  By scaling the scanned JPG file to 95% of original, it now prints like it should, with the form taking up the entire page (or almost, vertically), and uses the corresponding group header, detail, and group footer fields and aligns them just great.   Except as before, when I save, it's gone, just an empty OLE container.  At least now, though, it's just a matter of re-adding the picture back in again, no resizing required.  Or, is that my problem?  Do I need to even further reduce the size of the scanned form?  I had tried 90% and it looked not so great.  I can live with that if it works, but this trial and error stuff is making me lose the last of my hair.  Is there some magic size in pixel or twips or whatever that the height and width cannot exceed?  If so, it sure would be nice if the program told you that.  Days of scanning google for this issue has indicated I am far from alone on this issue, but only one person seems to have solved it (and it appears in nearly every version of Crystal, not just 8.5) and they said they did it by reducing the size of the image, but no specifics.  Another claimed that it was simply a difference between double-clicking on the open picture dialog versus clicking once then clicking open instead (the latter of which he claimed worked - made no difference for me).

[abhilash_kumar · Accepted solution]

Hi Bill,

I'm having a hard time replicating this issue! No matter how huge the image is, it always shows up when I re-open the report.

Would you be able to share the report with saved data if possible? Also, the size of the report is huge because Crystal Reports converts images to .bmp format.

To attach the report, you would first need to change its extension to .txt.

-Abhilash

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Thank you for your prompt reply.  After days of working on this problem myself, I finally solved it about 1/2 hour after making that post.

I started experimenting with various sizes of the original scan: 90%, 85%, etc. each one failed.  So I went way the other way and shrunk it to 10% of its original size, and of course, it worked fine.  However, then resizing the image in the report left it with very poor resolution (to be expected).  So, I compromised and did one final scan resize (in PC Paint) to 50%k, resized it larger in Crystal, and it worked AND it saved properly.  And, as expected, the size of the .Rpt file went from 32 MB to 8 MB.

I think the original problem was that I kept importing a scan from my Brother multi-function printer/scanner/fax that was always a bit wider than the page limits.  I thought resizing the image to a smaller image would take care of it, and it DOES take care of it WHILE you're still in Crystal, but the program WILL NOT SAVE in that circumstance.  So, hopefully some fellow programmer who runs into the same problem in the future will google or bing this and find his or her solution.

I still have a few hairs left on my head to lose over the next programming hurdle!

[former_member183750 · Accepted solution]

Hello Bill and Abhilash

I'll also make a KBA out of this. The more places we have this info, the easier it will be to find.

- Ludek

Follow us on Twitter

Got Enhancement ideas? Try the SAP Idea Place

Share Your Knowledge in SCN Topic Spaces

[abhilash_kumar · Accepted solution]

Thanks Ludek!

This is great info here.

-Abhilash