Re: Crystal Reports from Forms

mkanders_at_mail.delcoelect.com wrote:
>
> Has anyone invoked crystal reports from oracle forms
> using the vbx 'crystal.vbx'. What is the built-in
> needed and how is it coded?
>
> Michael Anderson
> Oracle Developer
> (317) 451-7672

Save your time - the crystal.vbx is not compatible with Forms 4.5. I have discovered that very few vbx contols are. I am attaching an email that I got from someone who has invoked Crystal Reports from Forms, but I can't vouch for this method since I haven't tried it yet.

Good luck -

>Kevin--
>
>First, we tried to use the VBX control. This caused forms to GPF. (Big
>suprise there!) Then we began looking at the ORA_FFI interface to
>Crystal's print engine DLL. The trouble we ran into there was that
>certain functions required passing structures. Since forms does not
>support structures, we ended up writing a simple DLL (in C) that took
>atomic parameters from a form, put them into the structure that Crystal
>needed, then called the function in the Crystal DLL.
>
>It works very well. Another possibility would be to write a simple DDE
>server (in VB or whatever) that would handle the communications with
>Crystal's DLL. Then you could use the FORMS_DDE functions to talk to
>the DDE server you wrote.
>
> --
>Chris Fischer
>Intelligent Information Systems, Inc.
>Durham, NC 27713
>chrisf_at_renewal-iis.com
>(919)572-0901 x231
>-- *****************************************************************

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