Mike.Sheen wrote:Crystal Reports
Crystal Reports is like that machine that many factories have... The one that's been there for 30 years and runs off a DOS program that nobody has the source code for any more.
And it uses a file format that only it understands. And that is the only format generated by the program that runs the factory.
And getting a new one is just not "cost-effective", because, well, it's working, right? even if it requires constant maintenance so that it can carry on doing the only thing it's been doing for 30 years, and new ones can do so much more...
I think you'd do yourself a huge service if you can "eject" Crystal from your main code base. You'll remove a major pain point (I've coded with Crystal, so you have my sympathies), and provide a platform for interesting new features, not least of which would be the possibility of using an engine other than Crystal.
I have written a couple of small standalone apps that use the Crystal Runtime to generate PDF files - so I know that it would be fairly easy to have an external app (e.g.) monitoring a folder or SQL table where 'metadata' is deposited by Jiwa, for processing by the external reporting engine, whatever form that takes.
Long reports would also no longer have the user twiddling their thumbs for 30 minutes while the report runs...
And there are a few other engines out there that are much less "Bloaty" than CR, which hasn't changed functionally (as far as I can tell) in 20 years, and yet is now 10 times the size it once was.