Creating & Distributing Formatted
Reports
Purpose
By integrating Crystal Reports into SAP BW, you can create formatted reports and make them available to your users.
Process Flow
The following overview shows you the process behind the creation and publishing of a formatted report:
1. You can use the Crystal Reports Designer to create report definitions for formatted reports. Start the Crystal Reports Designer and, from the Open BEx dialog, choose a BW query to be the basis of the formatted report.
You can choose queries you have already created or call up the BEx Query Designer via a jump from the Crystal Reports Designer, and create a new query from there.
When designing a query, that forms the basis of the formatted report, you should be sure that it does not contain more characteristics and key figures than are required in the formatted report. If the query that forms the basis of the formatted report has more characteristics or key figures it can lead to performance problems because the OLAP processor calculates the whole query.
2. After you have selected the query, the system transfers the metadata to the Crystal Reports Designer.
3. The Crystal Reports Designer allows you to create reports with a layout accurate to the nearest pixel, and to create reports based on formulas. After creating your report, you can display the BW query data in the formatted repot via a preview function.
You can find additional information in the Crystal Reports Designer documentation.
4. Save the formatted report and assign it to a BW role.
4. The formatted reports are stored in the BW system and managed in the Administrator Workbench. Formatted reports can be transported with the BW transport system.
5. After you have saved the formatted report in BW, you need to publish it on the Crystal Enterprise Server before it can become available to users. The formatted report is stored on the Crystal Enterprise server in rpt format.
If you want to use formatted reports from Business Content, you need to activate them, assign them to a BW role and then publish them on the Crystal Enterprise server component. This also enables these reports to be accessed by users.
6. The formatted reports can be displayed via the Web browser or the Enterprise Portal. When starting the report, the system checks user authorization for the report.
Result
You have created a formatted report and can make it available to your users via the Web browser or the Enterprise Portal.
You can precalculate data for formatted reports with the Reporting Agent. Fort
more information, refer to
Defining
Crystal-Reports-Queries Settings.
See also: