Does cfreport work at all with Crystal Reports?

[jdavis2]

I've come across a lot of mixed info out there about displaying a Crystal Report with the cfreport tag.  A lot of the topics out there either don't involve our versions or never get replies.  We are currently using Coldfusion 8 and Crystal Reports 12.  Crystal Reports is installed on the server and the report works just fine, but when using the cfreport tag to try and open the report; nothing happens.  No error, but no report is displayed either.

Does anyone know what the problem is or if this even works?  Much appreciated.

[ilssac]

At one time, about Version 3, Crystal Reports was bundled with ColdFusion and the <cfreport...> tag worked great with it.  Then, I guess, there was some type of falling out or something.  Anyway the companies went their seperate ways.  As far as I can tell Crystal Reports now actively tries to break the functionality of the ColdFusion <cfreport...> tag.  And then the ColdFusion engineers will fix it.

This is all my personal consipiricy theory.  But what I know is that the <cfreport...> tag seems to work better with older versions of Crystal Reports and very poorly with the latest versions.  Now, I have not tried to connect these two products together for nearly five years now.  But back then, it mattered what "type" of Crystal Report one made.  I can't remember the exact terminology, but it dealt with the type of paramters one used in the Crystal Report.  One type of parameter worked just fine, the other did not.

At one time, I also experimented with using JSP technology to run the Crystal Reports.  Crystal provided JSP code to run their reports.  And as ColdFusion is also a JSP, technically, it should be able to tap the same code.

But in the end, we just concluded that it was not worth the trouble for us at the time.  So none of this ever went very far.  I now work for a different organization that does not use Crystal Reports, so I am not up to date on the latest issues.

[jdavis2]

Thanks for the input, Ian.  I was a little afraid that was going to be the response.  I've actually now found Adobe documentation stating that they work together as recently as Crystal Reports 10 and Coldfusion MX 6.1.  (http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/186/tn_18639.html)  Nothing official affirming or denying since then.  I'll leave this open a bit to see if there are any more recent opinions on the matter.

[ilssac]

jdavis2 wrote:

I've actually now found Adobe documentation stating that they work together as recently as Crystal Reports 10 and Coldfusion MX 6.1.  (http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/186/tn_18639.html)

That is more or less the foundation of my personal consipiricy theory.  It seems that the ColdFusion <cfreport...> tag will work with the current versions of Crystal Report out when CF is released.  Then the next version of Crystal Reports will break this connection.  Then the next version of CF will fix it, then the next version of CR will break it...and so on and so on.

[bernsmi]

so what version of crystal report works with CF 9?  Do you need to run crystal reports

server or can you use a stand alone crystal installed on the CF server?