SAP Crystal Reports Reviews and Pricing

Owner at a tech consulting company with 51-200 employees

Jul 3, 2013

Crystal Reports on SAP Mobile BI

It seems like every month SAP is unleashing new functionality for its Mobile BI app. Explorer, Web Intelligence and recently Dashboards have all made their way into the BI app and seem to work better, look nicer and perform faster then on the desktop! The mobile versions are not only slick and easy to use, they are also very easy to deploy to. For webi, all it takes to turn the report to mobile ready is assignment to a category (as is the case for Dashboards and Crystal), Explorer is there by default, and Dashboard can be saved as Mobile when exported to the repository. It’s that simple. Well, almost… While the product does allow developers to deploy content to the BI app very easily, the challenges of the design are still there, with a twist. Data issues, business logic complexities, real estate constraints, functionality gaps, all of the same challenges that make BI content development difficult for any device are applicable, with the additional challenge of new constraints related to mobile device usage and functionality that is “ramping up”. And while Webi, Explorer and Dashboards are “sexy”, dashing and elegant tools, I set out to try the capabilities of good old Crystal Reports on the BI App, and as always when it comes to Crystal, I was not disappointed!

While Crystal on the iPad lacks some of the Explorer and Webi “swooshiness” and feels a bit “boxy”, it certainly provides much more flexibility in design, navigation and layout capabilities. And since images can be used to enhance its look and feel, Crystal can be made to look as modern as any. Unlike in Webi on the mobile BI app where the report design is limited to simplistic blocks that get converted automagically to the stunning iPad design, Crystal reports will render EXACTLY the way you design them on the desktop. So you can layout the screen any which way you like, which can be very important for some design situations. Crystal unlimited data connectivity also makes it a great choice for directly connecting to any data source with ease. So your crystal report on the iPad will connect to anything you need to, from Universes to any RDBMS, web service, and beyond. The group tree functionality is also enables on the iPad and provides slick and easy way to navigate large hierarchies on the iPad, prompts, work as well and drill downs are all there in their interactive glory. You can paginate using the page number icons, or simply swipe left to move to the next page. Nice.

The image I posted is from a Crystal Report I created with sales data and hierarchy, and I hope it provides a good example of what Crystal actually looks like on the iPad.

So, all in all, Crystal can be an important companion for your mobile BI content deployment, and after more than two decades of reign over the enterprise reporting realm can still help address use cases and reporting scenarios that other more modern tools cannot.

Disclosure: My company is a SAP partner

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.

it_user6606

BI Expert at a energy/utilities company with 501-1,000 employees

May 21, 2013

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Highly flexible and customizable - usually a big plus but sometimes not

Pros and Cons

"Creative formula construction is just one of the many tools in Crystal Reports that allows this tool to be so flexible and robust."

"All the options - These same options that allow Crystal Reports to be so customizable and really achieve the report your customers desire can be a burden."

Valuable Features:

Great Flexibility - the limitations in how or what the report will look & feel is really limited by the developer. Formulas can be placed on virtually any field or level. Data can be conditionally suppressed, fonts changed, splashes of color added all dependent on the data provided.Data sources options - whether you're connecting via DB2, MySQL, MS SQL, Oracle, a WebService, or any other number of connection types - there are tons of inherent connections to the tool. Configuring a connection is done easily with a wizard, and changing the connection (say during an upgrade of the source system or a server change) can be done very easily as well while retaining the report fields.Sub-Reports - many times a complex report may report on many different aspects of the data, tethering tying together lots of different data together into a nice little report. Using sub-reports allows the different reports and their SQL to be compartmentalized, while still allowing the reports fields and the variables to be shared between the main report and the sub-report(s).Formulas - Once you get the hang of the formulas in Crystal Reports, they are very powerful. Different flags and indicators can be constructed, suppression based on the formula fields, or formula fields based on other formula fields in conjunction with the source data. Creative formula construction is just one of the many tools in Crystal Reports that allows this tool to be so flexible and robust.

Room for Improvement:

All the options - These same options that allow Crystal Reports to be so customizable and really achieve the report your customers desire can be a burden. If you have "inherited" an existing report, there are a number of different ways that the "Look and Feel" of the report may have been achieved - and sometimes figuring out how something was done in Crystal Reports can be like solving a Hardy Boys mystery!Syntax constructs - the syntax used in Crystal Reports (formulas) is slightly different than most other languages, using a combination of curly brackets and pipes with some traditional syntax. When constructed incorrectly, there isn't much assistance in what steps you need to take to correct your formula - only something telling you it is wrong!

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.

it_user6606BI Expert at a energy/utilities company with 501-1,000 employees

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Nov 12, 2013

Both Pros are very true. I really like how many different options there are. These options are fantastic to get the specific data that a customer is after. There are instances where a SQL command may not be able to completely get the data desired, but there are so many other ways to dive further into the data through report queries, formulas, and creative supression techniques that eventually you can get a report that is very specific and provides customers the data they want. The downside is - for a developer that is new or inherrits some monsterous reports, sometimes it involves peeling back multiple layers to truly discover how the report is rendered.

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