Crystal Reports XI — What's New

Updated Report Designer

Accelerate report authoring with an updated point-and-click designer, new report workbench, nested hierarchies, “intelligent” charting, and HTML report preview.

Dynamic Cascading Prompts

Minimize report maintenance with automatically updated pick lists and cascading prompts.

Updated Drivers

Crystal Reports XML, JDBC, IBM DB2 and Exchange data drivers have been updated to give you an incredible range of data access options. Dynamic Image Location Pictures and graphics can now be placed in a report through a link in the database so that it is no longer necessary to store images within the database. This supports the common practice of storing images on the web server and storing references to those images in the database.

Updated Visual Report Designer

Use the updated point-and-click designer to create reports and alleviate intensive coding.

Intelligent Charting

New drag and drop charting and cross-tabs allow for intelligent charting. Variables are approximated when a chart is dropped into a section. Chart design is now faster and easier because charts will be updated automatically when new variables are added.

Hierarchical Grouping

Layout control is enhanced so that users can create their reports in a hierarchical, rather than just a relational manner. This provides a better fit for organizational charts and summary reports. Enhanced Productivity and Maintenance. Dynamic and Cascading Prompts Report prompts can be based on dynamic values. This means that report designers no longer have to maintain static prompt value lists within individual reports. Instead, they can reuse existing prompts stored in the repository.

HTML Preview

The iterative report design/view process is streamlined, with a new HTML preview that allows report authors to see how reports will look when published to the web.

Editable RTF Format

This new feature is ideal for report export editing. It delivers reports to end users in a new RTF format, so they can easily make their own document modifications.

Report Export Configuration

The report designer can save report export configuration information within the report itself so that the end user forgoes the time and trouble of reconfiguring the export each time a report is run.

Free Runtime Licensing

Crystal Reports Developer Edition includes a royalty-free runtime license that allows for unlimited internal corporate deployment of the Crystal Reports .NET, Java and COM (RDC) report engine components without the need to pay additional licensing fees for multiple servers or CPUs.

New and Improved APIs

New and improved cross-platform APIs include server-side printing as well as the ability to configure sub reports as if they were full-blown reports.

Custom Java function Libraries

Developers can incorporate their own code within Crystal reports.

Data Binding

Java and .NET developers can take advantage of data binding by using unbound fields in the Crystal Reports Designer and binding application data to those fields at runtime.