Designing Crystal Reports for SAP Business One: SQL Views and User Defined Fields plus Customization

We would like to help you in the sense of pointing out to the most typical mistakes that you may expect to make while designing your first reports.  Also this Small Business ERP is flexible in letting you create user defined tables and fields directly in settings and without SQL Server Management Studio design work.  Let’s begin with SQL View and Stored Procedure recommendations:

1. If your report is something trivial as getting the list of Business Partners then you can pull this info from single table without problem.  However there is no need here to appeal to CR power as all the job could be done by exporting internal report to Excel or compiling simple query.  The reason for you to do design in Crystal is probably the fact that other integrated tools have limitations 2. Well, perfect and why don’t I just have designer wizard to do the job?  The reason is simple to discourage you to use wizard.  If SB1 query doesn’t do the job then you should think about the power of SQL View or even better SQL Stored Procedure.  View allows you to deploy Union statement in SQL Select query and Stored Procedure gives you an option to deploy temporary tables and SQL Cursors

3. Make report record set tested prior to even launching Report Designer application.  One of the most popular mistakes we have seen so far and were able to fix is when novice developer creates state-of-the-art presentation level with extremely complex data links and internal restrictions formulae.  Often nice presentation is complicated with numerous sub-reports.  It is difficult if not possible to debug report execution.  If data selection logic is wrong chances are high that you would have to start from scratch in the new version.  We recommend you to begin with SQL View or Stored Procedure and test its logic directly in SQL Query in SQL Server Management Studio.  This learning curve is a way shorter comparing to redoing report from scratches over and over again in the future

4. User Defined Fields and Tables.  Reporting is often related to customization.  SAP B1 in comparison to older Corporate ERP packages such as Dynamics GP has more advanced customizability options.  Directly in settings you can expand existing native tables with newly created user defined fields and even introduce new user defined tables.  Data entry interface is created automatically to each newly introduced custom table and you can enable editing new user defined fields by opening the form in user interface and selecting in menu: View -> User Defined Fields.  User defined objects are often created as part of custom integration logic and Crystal is perfect engine for reporting on custom tables and fields.  Custom tables are often animated with Software Development Kit programming

5. Please call us 1-866-304-3265, 1-269-605-4904 (for international customers, where our representatives pick up the phone in Naperville and St. Joseph, MI call centers).  help@efaru.com.  We have local presence in Atlanta, Chicago, Southern California, South West Michigan, Houston and Dallas areas of Texas. We serve customers USA, Canada, Mexico and Brazil nationwide and internationally via web sessions and phone conferences (Skype is welcomed). Our consultants speak English, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian and Chinese.  One of our experiences is international Corporate ERP and Consolidated Financial reporting