How Crystal Reports Integrates With Jiwa

Jiwa uses the “Crystal Runtime” to run a report, and the “Crystal Report Viewer” (an ActiveX control) to display the report on the screen.  The screenshot below shows the “Crystal Report Viewer” denoted within the red box - with the rest of the report screen, including the Settings and Formula tabs, being controlled by Jiwa.

A report can be accessed via the menu (menu based) or from a form (form based) in Jiwa. 

• Form Based - the report is printed by clicking on the print icon in the form, the report usually has some parameters set automatically by the form and the report is printed to the screen immediately without any user input.
• Menu Based - the report is selected from the report menu and the is presented with a series of parameters which can be manipulated to fine tune the selection of information to be reported.

There are 3 points of integration between Jiwa and a Crystal report:

1. Auto-populated formulae
2. Range parameters
3. Report settings formulae

Auto populated formulae are simply Crystal formulae of a particular name that Jiwa will look for and populate.  Examples include “Pass_User” and “Pass_CompanyName”.  Jiwa is case insensitive when searching for Crystal formulae of a particular name.

Range parameters are Crystal formulae that have names beginning with “Pass_” (case insensitive) and appear in the “Record Selection Formula” section of the report (in the Crystal Report Designer). You can access the “Record Selection Formula” by loading a report and going to Report Selection Formulas Record.   These formulae are what Jiwa uses to construct the grid on the “Ranges” tab of the report screen.  This grid is denoted by the red box in the screenshot below.

Report settings formula are formulae that have a particular name, and contain a value that will be used by Jiwa to change the behaviour of the Crystal report engine or the Crystal report viewer, or both, during report execution. 
For example, if a formula with a name of “Pass_OverridePrinterPaperSize”  exists in the report, and it’s value is a valid Crystal paper size, Jiwa will set the printer paper size to be this instead of the paper size that the report was developed for.   A full list of Report settings formula, and their possible values, is given in Appendix A.

Both auto-populated formulae and range parameters will be covered in detail in the next section.

Refer to "Points of Integration"

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