Crystal Reports for Eclipse Blog

Diamond Has It All!

2007-07-30T15:09:00.000-07:00

We are no longer using this site. Please go to http://diamond.businessobjects.com/eclipse for the latest news, downloads, samples, and contacts.

Crystal Reports for Eclipse Professional – Now Available!

2006-10-16T11:52:00.000-07:00

Last week Business Objects officially launched Crystal Reports for Eclipse Professional. This release builds on the Crystal Reports for Eclipse Basic edition, which has been available as a free download from http://www.businessobjects.com/eclipse since August. The Professional edition, geared towards developers that require a more robust runtime engine, introduces the most powerful version of Business Objects’ Java runtime engine to date. At a price point of $495 US per server Crystal Reports for Eclipse Professional provides Java developers with the following benefits:

Up to 5X more throughput than the Basic runtime engine
2 technical support incidents
Licensing for multi-server deployments

The Eclipse integration itself is exactly the same as what you get with Crystal Reports for Eclipse Basic edition. At Business Objects we felt that it was important to give everyone the opportunity to benefit from the extensive bundle of tools we provide for Crystal Report developers working in Eclipse. Your upgrade decision should be based entirely on your runtime requirements and/or support needs, and not based on the list of tools included in the bundle.

With the Professional launch, we have introduced an easy interface to allow users to add their Professional keycodes to existing installs of Crystal Reports for Eclipse Basic. This means that all of your existing applications built using the Basic edition can be upgraded to use the Professional engine with a single mouse click.

Note: If you have downloaded the Basic version of Crystal Reports for Eclipse prior to the launch of the Professional edition you will need to update your existing install. You can use Eclipse’s built-in Update Manager utility to easily do this. However, if you need further information you can check out the Eclipse section of Business Objects Diamond site (http://diamond.businessobjects.com/eclipse) for step-by-step instructions on how to update your existing installs of Crystal Reports for Eclipse.

To purchase Crystal Reports for Eclipse Professional visit our online store at:
http://store.businessobjects.com/store/bobjects/DisplayProductDetailsPage/productID.52068100/pgm.3937100

For more information about Crystal Reports for Eclipse, check out the Business Objects Diamond site at http://diamond.businessobjects.com/eclipse

SPECIAL!! Register for Business Objects’ inaugural Developer Conference (Nov.5-6, San Francisco, CA) by Oct.20 and receive a free copy of Crystal Reports for Eclipse Professional. The 2 day conference, priced at $495, offers more than 50 sessions on Business Objects’ developer solutions. For more information on the Developer’s conference check out: http://www.businessobjectsevents.com/americas2006/controller.cfm?view=devday.dhome&source=303

Can’t make it to San Francisco…check out the Developer Roadshow visiting Chicago, New York, Washington DC and Boston during the week of Oct. 30^th:
http://www.businessobjects.com/jump/xi/roadshow.asp

Who wants more power?!

2006-09-19T10:30:00.000-07:00

Like Tim Allen's tool guy, most people always seem to want "more power". Well, if you have ever wanted more power with your Business Objects' software then fear not, because I have just the answer. We have just announced our Developer Road Show, which will take a number of Business Objects' "domain experts" on the road to spend a day with you. During this 1/2 day session attendees will have an opportunity to learn best practices, advanced techniques and some helpful tips and tricks for getting the most out of our product line. On top of this, there will be an opportunity for Q&A to get answers to your specific questions. Add on a top-notch lunch and there really is no reason why any Business Objects' user would not want to attend.

So, if you live near Boston, NYC, DC, Chicago or San Fran I would highly recommend that you check out the dates that we will be passing through your city. Hopefully, I will see you there.

For more info on the Developer Road Show (as well as a list of the sessions) check out the following link: http://www.businessobjects.com/jump/xi/roadshow.asp

Until next time.

Sean

Busy, busy, busy

2006-08-17T19:54:00.000-07:00

As most people in the software industry know it is always a little hectic around launch time. Now that the product has been out for a few weeks, I finally have a chance to catch my breath. Lately I have been spending most of my time doing one of the following:

monitoring the forums on our Developer Community site (http://diamond.businessobjects.com),
shamelessly flaunting the launch on any site that will listen
scoping out the next release.

Throw in a few customer calls and training sessions and that has pretty much been my life for the past 2 weeks

We also had an official press release this past Monday. If you haven't read the press release yet you can do so here . I wanted to thank Jessica (I know she visits here now and then) for the great quote. I am interested to hear what you, or anyone else for that matter, thinks of the official release. I am really proud of what the team has accomplished and honestly believe that it is by far the best reporting tool for Java developers on the market today. I truly believe I would say this even if Business Objects wasn't paying my salary. That being said I still believe there are still a few things that I think we can do with this product to make it even better. No really, there is still some room for more features As I mentioned above I am in the process of scoping out the next few updates to this release. If you have some feedback or suggestions that you would like to pass on to me feel free to add your post to the following forum:http://diamond.businessobjects.com/forum/195

Based on the current state of this forum (right now it is empty) it truly must be a great product! Seriously though, I would love to hear what you think so let me know. Good or bad I am sure the team here would love to hear what you have to say.

Additionally, our plugin is available on Eclipse Plugin Central. If you feel the urge to rate our plugin (between 1 and 10) you can do so at http://www.eclipseplugincentral.com/Web_Links-index-req-viewlink-cid-670.html

Until next time...

Sean

P.S. You can also use that forum to let me know what tutorials, samples, video walkthorughs you would like to see

What a beautiful day for a launch!

2006-07-30T21:32:00.000-07:00

I am writing this post a few hours early because I am finding it difficult sitting here in anticipation...waiting to spread the news. Tomorrow, Monday July 31 2006, marks the official release date of Crystal Reports for Eclipse. I will be working like a busy little beaver tomorrow to ensure that all of the pieces are in place so that everyone of you has access to this great piece of software. We plan to make this product available on a number of different sites, so I wanted to take the time to explain what the end-user can expect when they download the product from the different sites:

If you choose to download the product from a non-Business Object's site (e.g. www.eclipseplugincentral.com) your reports will appear in the designer with a small report footer watermark saying "Register for free at www.businessobjects.com/eclipse to remove this message". Users who receive this message can go to the URL mentioned in the message and register for free. They will then be able to download a small plugin (8KB) which can be added to their Eclipse install to remove the message.
If you use Eclipse's built-in Update Manager to install Crystal Reports for Eclipse you will need to follow the same steps outlined in #1 to remove the watermark
If you download the all-in-one build or plug-in zip package available on the Business Object's site (http://diamond.businessobjects.com/eclipse) these will already have the watermark removed

So, you may be asking yourself, what does this allow me to do? What do I get when I remove the watermark? Well, in short...pretty much anything. You can build web-based or rich-client applications which can be used for internal corporate consumption, extranet sites, or even your own personal projects. Whatever you want to do the choice is up to you?

So what about the limitations you ask...well, in web-based applications your application will be limited to a single-server deployment with the free license. As well, you cannot bundle the runtime files in an application which is intended to be sold or distributed outside your organization. Finally, there will be no free technical support included with product. You will still have access to our forums and developer content on the Diamond site, however if you wish to speak with a support representative you will likely want to upgrade to our Professional version. That's right...I said Professional version..."What the heck is the Professional version?" you may be wondering. This is likely the first time you have ever heard me mention that there will be 2 versions of this product. So let me take a step back and give you the low-down of what we will be offering with our Crystal Reports for Eclipse product line. Tomorrow, we will actually be launching our Crystal Reports for Eclipse Basic edition. A few weeks later we will follow this up with a Crystal Reports for Eclipse Professional edition. What does this mean for you, the end user? Well, here's the breakdown of what you get:

1) Crystal Reports for Eclipse Basic edition - includes embedded Report Designer, IDE tooling, license to deploy on a single server within your organization
Cost to the End User:FREE!

2) Crystal Reports for Eclipse Professional edition - includes embedded Report Designer, IDE tooling, ability to deploy in a multi-server deployment, more powerful engine (up to 5 times more throughput than Basic) and 2 Customer Support incidents.
Cost to the End User:$495/server

That's right. You read correctly. Everyone can now create their Java applications using the most powerful reporting engine on the planet, and deploy them into production...without ever paying a dime!

We hope that you are as excited with this news as we are. With these two editions of Crystal Reports for Eclipse we provide the developer with all the tools they need to quickly and easily integrate a presentation layer within their applications. Additionally, we provide them with the flexibility to choose the best engine for their solution. Even to move up to our Crystal Reports Server or BusinessObjects Enterprise platforms, without having to change the reports.

So, please keep an eye out for the release announcements tomorrow and give it a try. You have nothing to lose.

Talk with you later,
Sean

Anyways...or should I say Anyway...the Beta is a hit!

2006-06-19T09:18:00.000-07:00

The title of today's blog requires a little background knowledge to fully understand it. Not so much on the Beta release being a hit, as that is pretty self-explanatory (over 1400 downloads in the last 2 weeks!), but rather the use of Anyways vs. Anyway. I happened to be at a cocktail party this past Saturday with the likes of Tim Lang (actually it was his place) and James Thomas, both fellow contributors to the Crystal Reports for Eclipse blog. At one point during the night the topic of conversation found its way to my blog posts. Apparently, my use of the word "anyways" has been slowly driving JT to the brink of insanity. This in itself, however very amusing (and somewhat enjoyable), is not that entertaining if it wasn't for the fact that my wife chastised me on my use of "anyways" only a few months back. I began to realize that maybe this was a serious thing. Maybe other people found it extremely irritating whenever I used this term (8 times on the current posts alone).

Now, I am the first to admit that the use of "anyways" may be considered slang or non-standard, however it's not like I am confusing my use of there (or their, or they're). I would imagine that JT would have a coronary if I started throwing in a few misuses of these words (or perhaps mispell definitely now and then). Such is the plight of a Marketing person who is forced to read a blog which allows Product Managers to post! However, doesn't the entire nature of blogs present itself as a forum to communicate on a less formal platform? The use of slang should not be shunned but instead encouraged as we open ourselves up to our readers. So in essence, every time I use "anyways" in my blog posts, it is my way of inviting everyone of my blog readers into my inner circle...my circle of trust so to speak.

Regardless, I still understand that their (yes this was on purpose...sorry JT) are Directors of Marketing or people with English Lit. degrees (aka "my wife") who feel a large amount of discomfort when reading incorrect English grammar. Unfortunately, my search for support groups in the Vancouver area which cater to the misuse of English slang in the written word proved fruitless. So, instead I thought I would do my bit to help alleviate some additional stress these people may encounter by reading the word "anyways" in a sentence. I have compiled a list of classic literature which includes the word "anyways" (thanks to www.thefreelibrary.com for the search engine). I would suggest that James, my wife, and anyone else who is easily offended by the use of "anyways" not read the following classics:

Charles Dickens

Hard Times
Great Expectations
Bleak House
The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby
A Tale of Two Cities
Barnaby Rudge - A Tale Of The Riots Of 'Eighty
Little Dorrit
Our Mutual Friend
David Copperfield

Mark Twain

Pudd'n'head Wilson
Tom Sawyer
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Herman Melville

Moby Dick

Anne Bronte

Agnes Grey

Rudyard Kipling

Captains Courageous
The Mutiny of the Mavericks

Joseph Conrad

Heart of Darkness

George Eliot

Silas Marner
Adam Bede

By the way, for those of you keeping count, aside from the references I never used "anyways" once in the body of my blog entry....yet!

Anyways, until next time... :)

Sean

The Beta Release is now available!

2006-06-06T06:45:00.000-07:00

Hello everyone,
I apologize for the lack of communication over the past few months, but it has been extremely hectic here. With all the conferences I have been to (EclipseCon, MySQL UC, JavaONE and the Rational Software Development Conference) plus the required work finishing off the loose ends around the Beta release I began to feel like I post to this blog almost as often as I talk to my mother (which is not really a good thing on both accounts). I expected to start receiving flame posts talking about how I never call, or bring the kids around anymore, etc., etc., etc.

Thankfully, hopefully this post will buy me some more time, especially with the great news I have. We have officially released the Beta build of Crystal Reports for Eclipse. The process to download it is the same as the process to download the Tech Preview...just go here to register and you will be sent an email with the required instructions. I apologize ahead of time if you have already filled out the survey, however we want to do some tracking on our end to see how many of the Preview users are coming back to try out the Beta...hopefully all of you!

You should note that the Beta will not upgrade over top of the Tech Preview release. The Beta is actually built on an RC build of Eclipse 3.2 and has a number of the 3.2 plugin dependencies. However, once again we have provided an all-in-one build to make the process of downloading and using the beta as easy as possible.

What can users expect from the Beta, well there are a number of new features (too many to list here) but I will do my best to highlight the top ones:

Set Datasource location is now a menu item - users can easily convert datasources stored in a report to a new connection using a menu driven wizard (e.g. ODBC to JDBC)
Guideline indicators are now available - the guidelines will provide an indicator when fields are aligned, both horizontally and vertically, making the report layout process extremely easy and powerful
POJO support is now available - Drag and drop a Java class from your project workspace onto a report to begin using your class as a datasource
Custom SQL is now supported - create your own SQL text using Eclipse's built in SQL editor to write your own queries
Browse Data - users can browse data from the Field Explorer off a specific field object or even a table object - this is very useful when using the graphical UI to create your database links
Deployment wizard - new wizards extend the project's build event in an attempt to ensure that all of the required drivers are present. Users will alerted if specific libraries (e.g. database JAR files) are not present when the application is deployed
New JSP page wizard - Drag and drop a report onto a JSP page and users will be prompted with a new wizard which will offer the ability to add customized code, such as passing in database credentials, populating parameter values, etc. all specific to the report that was added to the page

Anyways, there are a number of other features that have also been added, but unfortunately I am running out of time. I have to get back to the conference floor :)

I am planning on doing a webinar soon so keep your eye out for an invite, as well as updating the content on our EclipseZone to include a number of video presentations demonstrating some of the key features in the Beta release.

I look forward to talking with you again soon,
Sean

P.S.
Mom, I will call you when I get back in town. :)

On the road again...

2006-04-13T09:34:00.000-07:00

So it has been a busy few weeks here. We have had a successful Developer Road Show that saw us visit Boston, Washington, New York, Chicago and San Francisco with some members from our Engineering and Product groups. After that we had a very large presence at EclipseCon where we presented a tutorial on Crystal Reports for Eclipse, sponsored the opening night reception as well as sponsored the Open Source Pavilion.

Looking ahead the next stop for me will be at the MySQL User Conference, taking place April 24-27, 2006 at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, California. On Tuesday, April 25th, I will be doing a presentation, during which I will do a quick demo of Crystal Reports for Eclipse. After the MySQL User Conference, some of my team mates are off to Europe to attend the Business Objects' European User Conference. They will follow-up their week at the conference with a European version of the Developer Road Show we put on here in North America. Unfortunately, I will not be on this trip as it conflicts with this year's JavaONE conference (May 16-19) at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. On top of all this gallivanting around the country apparantly I am still supposed to do my other work, hence the lack of posts the last few weeks.

Anyways, if any of you are going to be attending either the MySQL User Conference or JavaONE please stop by the booth and say "Hi". I always enjoy meeting customers who have used our products.

Until next time...

Sean

Crystal Reports for Eclipse - Tutorial at EclipseCon 2006

2006-02-28T13:44:00.000-08:00

If you are planning on attending EclipseCon 2006 in at Hyatt Regency Santa Clara then you may want to come and see Sean in a FREE tutorial on Monday 20th March at 1:30 thru 5pm.

This tutorial will guide users through the creation of a web application from start to finish, using the newly released Crystal Reports for Eclipse product to provide a high quality presentation layer with literally zero-coding from the developer. As time permits, users will also be guided through the process of migrating the solution to a full BI solution, enabling scheduling, integrated security, load balancing and fault-tolerance. No previous experience with Crystal Reports is required, however a basic understanding of web development is a pre-requisite

Information about the session can be found at http://www.eclipsecon.org/2006/Sub.do?id=417.

This tutorial will be FREE and will be a great opportunity to get to know Crystal Reports for Eclipse and ask questions to our product experts.

Tim
tim.lang@businessobjects.com

What's next for Crystal Reports for Eclipse?

2006-02-14T09:01:00.001-08:00

I know that we haven't even hit Beta for our initial offering but already we have started talking about we can do next. For those of you who are familiar with Business Objects, you will know that we have a pretty extensive suite of software offerings. Whether it's our Query and Analysis tools, our Performance Management offerings, our award winning BI platform or our Data Integration software, there are a number of opportunities for us to explore when deciding what type of tooling we want to offer Eclipse Developers next. One of the ideas I have my heart set on is to provide some developer tooling around our Crystal Xcelsius product. I'm not sure how many of you have had an opportunity to try this product yet but the "cool" factor is way up on this one. Crystal Xcelsius falls under what we call "Interactive Visual Analytics" and was added to our suite with the acquisition of Infommersion last fall. Essentially, the product allows you to import Excel spreadsheets (or connect to data provided via web services) and build rich interactive visualizations around the data. The output can then be integrated into web pages, Powerpoint presentations or PDF documents.

Below are some screenshots of the output produced with Crystal Xcelsius. Clicking on the image will bring up the actual output allowing you to fully interact with the visualizations. (note: Macromedia Flash is required to view the links)

What did I tell you...pretty cool! Not only do these visualizations spice up your website, but just imagine what they do for your powerpoint presentations. It is pretty impressive to be able to handle the "what-if" scenarios in the middle of a presentation without having to generate a new report.

Anyways, if you are interested in learning more about the samples above or seeing more samples applications in action you can check out the Crystal Xcelsius showcase here. As well, we do have evaluation copies of the software which users can download. If you don't believe me when I say it is extremely easy to create quality visualizations like those above then I suggest you give it a try on your own. You can download an evaluation of the software from here.

As I mentioned above, if I get my way we will soon see some tooling around this product showing up in Eclipse. I can foresee a lot of developers quickly falling in love with the "cool factor" associated with this product, as I have. Anyways, my apologies for going off on a Marketing tangent. As always I openly invite any comments or feedback. Let me know if you think developers will use a product like Crystal Xcelsius...or if you think I am out to lunch! :)

So, there's a little glimpse of what I am thinking about for future releases of Crystal Reports for Eclipse. If anyone else out there has ideas about what they would like to see in future releases feel free to comment on the post.

Well, it's back to work for me. Until next time...

Sean

Crystal Reports for Eclipse and Open Source Support

2006-02-09T08:55:00.000-08:00

There have been a couple questions regarding the strategy for Crystal Reports for Eclipse so I wanted to respond here. While we haven't released final pricing and availability details at this time, the fundamental strategy is to provide Eclipse developers with the well-known, proven, and powerful Crystal Reports embeddeded reporting functionality.

Crystal Reports for Eclipse builds on our heritage of providing bundled report design functionality with Microsoft (Visual Basic, VisualStudio.NET, and VisualStudio 2005), Borland, BEA, and IBM IDE's. We also include a limited scalability version of our report processing engine to get people started with their projects. In order to unlock the scalability, customers can purchase either the Crystal Reports Developer edition, Crystal Reports Server, or BusinessObjects Enterprise depending on their requirements.

Crystal Reports for Eclipse is not an open source project. We are not releasing the source code. However, we are providing a community web site, forums, and open lines of communication like this blog to rapidly respond to customer requests. We are providing developers software for no charge for design and testing (see below for more details). We are a member of eclipse.org , we are a Gold sponsor of EclipseCon, and we will continue to be an active supporter of the open source community. We believe we provide a solid combination of commercial software and support for the open source community with this initiative.

Our intention is to release the project similar to how open source projects are released using a 'release early and often' type of strategy. We have released a technical preview already. We will make a available a beta version as well before the final release later this year.

Building on our heritage and experience in providing integrated reporting into IDE's, we believe Crystal Reports for Eclipse will deliver superior report design, data access, and flexibile deployment options compared to any reporting tool on the market--open source or not.

We will provide the Crystal Reports for Eclipse software for no charge for developers. Developers can design reports and build applications for no charge. The preview software that's available now is very similiar to how developers will experience the final version. It's freely available! When a developer deploys the application on a server, we will offer low cost deployment licenses (with technical support) for integrated report viewing as well as higher end solutions for mission critical reporting and business intelligence applications. Exact pricing has not been released at this time. Note that Crystal Reports Developer is available for $595 US which allows for component-based report viewing. See the information sheet here for more details on these options.

We believe we'll provide all the benefits of an open source project without the risk of smaller vendors counting on you the developer paying support and services revenue to survive.

I'd like to encourage everyone to download the preview and give it a try for yourself. Please give us feedback on our product and/or our approach and help us help you.

Making a splash at EclipseCon 2006

2006-02-07T07:01:00.000-08:00

Business Objects has signed on to be a Gold Sponsor at this year's EclipseCon. It looks like a great lineup this year with over 140 technical sessions. The conference will be held in Santa Clara, CA from March 20 - 23. If you are able to attend I would highly recommend it. On top of being a Gold Sponsor, I will be presenting a free tutorial on Crystal Reports for Eclipse. This will be open for all attendees. You can find out more information about the tutorial here. You should be able to pre-register for the tutorial but I can't seem to figure out how to do it at this time.

As well, Business Objects is sponsoring the Open Source Pavilion in its inaugural appearance at EclipseCon. We will be providing up to 10 scholarships to open source projects. This will hopefully enable them to attend and show off their wares. For more information on the Open Source Pavilion check out this article on Eclipse.org.

Anyways, I hope to see you there. If you want more information about the conference check out the conference website at http://www.eclipsecon.org

Sean

Ginsu Reports...

2006-02-03T05:58:00.000-08:00

It slices... It dices... It even cuts through cans... not to mention it provides a little reporting now and then.

I am going to take a break from talking specifically about the integration with Eclipse and use the next few posts to talk about more general topics. I know that a lot of people who read this blog have used reporting technologies in the past. Whether it’s been Crystal Reports, WebIntelligence, JasperReports, BIRT, or any other reporting solution, most developers find themselves having a need for formatting and outputting data at some point in their career. I have been working with the Crystal Reports SDKs for over 5 years now, and during this time I have built many applications that lend themselves to the traditional “BI” solution (e.g. charts and listed data), but every now and then I find myself using the SDK/Report Designer to do something that most people wouldn’t think of trying with a reporting engine.

Often, when a developer looks at a requirement, the first thought that jumps to through their head is how they can build the solution. They may google the web to see if there are any code snippets that exist or look into which packages will provide the functionality to make their jobs easier, but in the end the path usually leads them to building their own solution. A few years back, when I was on the Developer Support team, I started thinking “How could this be done with Crystal Reports?”. The result... I ended up with quite an array of unique sample reports/applications. I thought it would be cool to see what the rest of you may have done with reporting, it doesn’t have to have been built with Crystal Reports, just any time that you may have used a reporting tool outside its “normal” boundaries. I have included 3 stories of mine, plus 1 from a colleague that I saw recently.

The Script Generator
As I mentioned earlier, I used to work on the Developer Support team. Back in the CR 8.0 and CR 8.5 days we used to also handle installation issues. Every once in a while a customer would call up because they were having issues with missing PROGIDs from the registry. This usually pointed to unregistered DLL files, normally due to lack of permissions when the product was installed. The solution was to either re-install the product or manually register the specific DLLs. Manually registering was often time consuming and generally a trial and error process. One day, while playing around with Crystal Reports, I noticed it had a database driver that allowed me to report off of the File System. Using this driver to filter the report to return only files with .dll extensions, I created a formula that read essentially "regsvr32 " + filename. I placed the formula in the Details section and exported to a text file. "Voila!" I now had a batch file that cycled through every and attempted to manually register every DLL file in the folder. What essentially took less than a few minutes to create ended up saving me and my customers a lot of time in the long run.

The Custom Calendar Report
This actually started out with a call from a customer who worked for a hotel chain. He wanted to create a calendar to show how many rooms were free on a given day in any month. Unfortunately, Crystal Reports did not come with a built-in Calendar control which allowed users to modify data on a given day. However, I was still able to create a mock-up which the user ended up using to dynamically create a calendar. I used Crystal Reports to create a report that contained 7x6 grid of text boxes. Using the Crystal Reports API I was able to modify the text box values at runtime based on the month and year. The result was a report which displayed a calendar with the number of available rooms for each day. I have since modified the application for a company that wanted to color-code the sales range for a particular day (e.g under $5000 = Red, etc.). This was easy to do once I had the template report already created.

Ebert who???
For those people who know me, most will agree that I am slightly addicted to my DVD movies. I have grown a rather substantial collection over the years, to the point where I now catalog my DVDs in a database. Anyways, as a Product Manager, we are trained to listen to what the market is telling us, this helps us build better product requirements. I have found that I now use this philosophy to pretty much guide my entire decision-making process. Whether I am choosing a restaurant to eat out at, a hotel to stay at or my next digital camera, I always find myself researching the public opinion websites to see what the rest of you have to say. Well, the same holds true with my personal DVD collection. I wanted to have a way to dynamically retrieve the latest public opinion about all my movies. I was able to do this using a Custom User Function Library(UFL) within Crystal Reports. If you haven't had an opportunity to play with these yet, they have some pretty cool capabilities. In a nutshell, UFLs allow users to make call-outs to external logic (Java, COM, C++) from within a report. Anyways, to solve my DVD public opinion issue I built a UFL that will take in the name of each of my DVDs and access the movie's page on IMDB.com. For those of you unfamiliar with IMDB.com, it is an online database of movies which allows the community to rate movies between 1 and 10. My UFL is able to retrieve this rating and return it to the report. This was only the beginning, I actually modified the UFL to return the DVD cover image, the synopsis, and the movie's Genre to my report. Now, when I want to choose a movie I can simply filter the report to return what I feel like that night. For example, I can search for "All Comedies with an average rating of 7.0 or higher". The report will bring back the list of DVDs, it's IMDB average rating, a brief synopsis of each movie and the DVD cover image. Now if only IMDB would add the genre "Chick-flick" I could filter those out before my wife has an opportunity to see the list :) . When "Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants" shows up with an average score of 7.0 on my Comedy list, I will likely find myself hunkering down to watch a bunch of girls share a pair of jeans for the summer if my wife gets hold of the list before me...but that's another story.

Finally, I recently had an opportunity to see something a co-worker was working on where he was using Web Services and our reporting technology to report off of places for sale on Craigslist.com. He was then using another web service to connect to the GoogleMaps API and pass in the address of each place on the market. The end result was a dynamic report which filtered the Craigslist listings and displayed the results on a map of the area. It was really cool.

Anyways, I am sure this is just the tip of the iceberg of what people have done with reporting technologies. I would love to hear what the rest of you have been able to accomplish so don't be afraid to post a reply.

Until next time.

Sean

Call for Feedback

2006-01-31T13:05:00.000-08:00

So the Tech Preview has been available for 2 weeks now. Based on the website stats it appears that quite a lot of you have had an oportunity to download it and give it a try. We had over 500 downloads in the first 24 hours which is a great response. Anyways, I want to once again put out my request for feedback. The forums have had some activity the past few weeks but I want more :)

Specifically, I want to know the following:

Things you don't like
Things that don't work
Workflows that are not intuitive
Workflows that are not supported

... and if you have time... feel free to list those things that you like.

I encourage you to try some of the more complicated reporting needs...things you know you will need once you go into production with this product. Some examples that you may want to try:

How to do a Top N/ Bottom N report
Using the Formula Editor
Using Charts
Inserting Subreports from existing reports/new reports
Using Parameters
Building Crosstab reports

We are scheduled to be releasing our Beta early to mid Q2 which means that the window to add usability enhancements is not very long. I want to get as many suggestions addressed as possible. Thanks again everyone, and I hope to hear from you soon.

Sean

Forums are up!

2006-01-19T11:34:00.000-08:00

The Crystal Reports for Eclipse forums have been published on our support web site. Currently we have 3 sub-categories in the main forum. These are:

General Inquiries (accessed directly here)
This forum will be where you want to go if you want to provide feedback, suggestions or general comments for the project team working on the Crystal Reports for Eclipse product

How To (accessed directly here)
If you have questions about Crystal Reports for Eclipse or want to share a tip you should post your message here

Known Issues (accessed directly here)
Submit your Crystal Reports for Eclipse bug requests here

The entireteam here at Business Objects is looking forward to monitoring the forums and hearing what the community has to say about the product.

Talk to you later,
Sean

Crystal Reports for Eclipse - Tech Preview Released!

2006-01-17T09:52:00.000-08:00

Hello everyone,
I am happy to announce that the Tech Preview of Crystal Reports for Eclipse has finally been released. For those of you who had pre-registered you should have received an email this morning with instructions on how you can download the plug-ins. If you have not yet had an opportunity to sign up for the Tech Preview you can do so here. This registration process will result with an email being sent to you so be sure to use a valid email address.

We have included a Getting Started Guide which will walk the user through the most common scenarios supported in this release. As well, within the next few days a forum will be provided on the main EclipseZone site of the Business Objects portal (www.businessobjects.com/eclipse) which will allow users to post questions and comments regarding the Tech Preview. Our team is looking forward to receiving lots of feedback regarding this initial release. Hopefully if all goes well we will have most of the suggestions implemented by the time our Beta ships.

For more information about the recent release announcement you can check out the EclipseZone here.

Talk to you soon,
Sean

Happy New Year!

2006-01-11T08:26:00.000-08:00

Hello everyone,
I hope that everyone had a great holiday season! Although I have just returned from a lengthy vacation, our Engineering team was busy working on the final touches for the Tech Preview release of Crystal Reports for Eclipse. At this time I can tell you that a release candidate of the product has been cut and we are actively working on ensuring that the required infrastructure is in place for when we go live with the product. The entire team here wants to make sure that our users' first experience with the product is a great one. I am busy creating supplemental documentation and viewlets to assist users in getting up and running in no time. On top of this we are creating a forum to ensure that our users have a means to report feedback and gain assistance with this release. If you have signed up to be notified of the availability of the release then you will receive an email with the required instructions...if you have not signed up to be notified you can do so here.

I would like to thank everyone who was able to attend the webinar we held back in December. Considering that it was late in the holiday season we were very happy with the number of attendees that dialled into the event. For those of you who were not able to attend, unfortunately we encountered some technical difficulties with the recording of the webinar. It seems that the audio portion was not successfully captured. However, everyone will soon have an opportunity to see the product in action as we will be planning another webinar very soon as well as providing some instructional viewlets demonstrating the product.

Hopefully my next post is announcing the availability of the Tech Preview so keep checking back with us...unless ofcourse you have signed up for the email :)

Talk to you soon,
-Sean

Update on Crystal Reports for Eclipse

2005-12-23T09:34:00.000-08:00

We would like to thank all of you that attended the Crystal Reports for Eclipse webinar on the 22nd. For those that missed the webinar we will be doing more live webinars in the New Year. We will also post a recorded copy of the webinar on www.businessobjects.com/eclipse and reference it in this blog.

We are going to take a couple of more weeks to finish off Crystal Reports for Eclipse preview release. We got some good feedback from some partners as well as some developers and wanted to ensure that the preview had improved workflows for developers (therefore a little extra time). With the Christmas break we are expecting to see the preview available for download in January with us currently targeting mid January. The product looks and feels really great, and we look forward to receiving feedback from the community when you get your hand on it.

We are also interested in bringing together a number of eclipse developers for a focus group on Crystal Reports for Eclipse. So if you are interested please feel free to contact me directly at tim.lang@businessobjects.com.

Tim Lang
VP Developer Marketing
Business Objects
Vancouver, BC, Canada

Crystal Reports for Eclipse: A look under the hood

2005-12-06T06:57:00.001-08:00

It has been almost one month now since we announced our Crystal Reports for Eclipse product and I have seen a few questions popping up on this blog and other message boards about what exactly our Eclipse-based designer will look like...under the hood so to speak. Well, hopefully I can answer some of these questions today.

To Wrap...or Not To Wrap
First off, let me start by saying that this is a complete rewrite of our Crystal Reports designer. It is not a wrapper around our existing Visual Studio integrated designer. Using our Java Reporting Component (JRC) as the engine, we will have a 100% Java based solution for designing Crystal Report documents. This will allow users to design reports on pretty much any platform which supports running Eclipse (e.g. Linux).

JRC: New and Improved!
Using the JRC as the engine for our new Designer demonstrates the capabilities and power of our Java reporting solution. Developers who are familiar with our integration within Visual Studio may be aware of the robust APIs we provide which allow for complete control of the report document at runtime. The new Crystal Reports for Eclipse designer is essentially a complex JRC application, built using the same components which will be available for our customers. We are quickly closing the parity gap between our .NET and Java solutions, giving our customers the freedom to choose the best platform for their application.

.NET in Eclipse!
No, we are not planning on introducing a .NET development environment within Eclipse. However, all of the reports which you design with the Crystal Reports for Eclipse product will work in your .NET applications with our .NET engine and viewers. Of course we also support running your .NET reports using our Java engine. Business Objects is proud to be the only Business Intelligence organization offering this type of cross-platform support.

Want More?
Running reports embedded directly in your Java application is great, but what happens when you need more? More security, more scheduling options, more scalability, more fault-tolerance...whatever the reason, it's inevitable that some of you will eventually reach the limit on what your embedded reporting solution can offer. The great news for users who choose Crystal Reports for Eclipse as their embedded reporting solution, is that the migrating to our platform is a painless procedure. All of the reports designed with the Eclipse designer will be supported on our BusinessObjects Enterprise and Crystal Reports Server product lines. On top of this, the APIs are based on the same object model so there should be minimal code change required. This type of flexibility provides comfort for developers who commit to using Crystal Reports as their reporting solution.

I Have My Reports...Now What?
Designing the reports is only one small portion of the tasks related to integrating a reporting solution into an application. There is also the task of ensuring that the runtime environment is setup correctly to generate the reports. On top of this, there is often a learning curve to understand the required API calls to display the reports. No matter how little time this takes, it is often time that a Developer does not have to spare...or more likely...not want to spare. We know that most Developers do not want to become Business Intelligence experts, and that integrating Crystal Reports into their application is usually to serve an immediate need. It's for this reason that Crystal Reports for Eclipse will include wizards and tooling to assist with the development of applications which include Crystal Reports. Once again, this type of tooling is a first for reporting solutions within the Eclipse IDE.

Sign-up!
If you haven't signed up to be notified when the Tech Preview becomes available, you can do so now.

Crystal Reports for Eclipse Unveiled

2005-11-09T12:50:00.000-08:00

At the Business Objects International User Conference today I had the opportunity to demonstrate the latest build of our Crystal Reports designer built on the Eclipse framework. For those of you who missed it I have included some screenshots below.

In developing the Crystal Reports embedded report designer we have taken advantage of as many existing Eclipse functionalities whenever possible. For example, we re-use the existing Database Explorer view currently included in the Eclipse Web Tools Platform Project as the UI for our database connectivity.

As well, we extend the Navigator, Outline and Properties views to ensure a familiar look and feel for Eclipse users.

Below is a screenshot depicting the Crystal Reports perspective and some of the associated views. Most existing Crystal Reports users will likely notice a lot of similarities to the current release of the Crystal Reports designer.

(Click on the picture to see a larger version)

However, existing users will also notice a few enhancements in comparison to the current Crystal Reports designer. For example, users can now compress and expand sections of the report with a click of the mouse. This functionality makes it a lot easier when dealing with reports containing a large number of sections.

Another enhancement is the Formula Pane. As seen in the image below, all of the formulas currently stored in the report can be accessed on a single pane within the editor. This includes custom formulas, conditional formatting formulas as well as record selection formulas. All of these formulas are easily identified by their descriptive headings and can be collapsed and expanded for easier readability and navigation. Of course, no formula editor would be complete without syntax checking. As you can see in the screenshot below, syntax errors are displayed just as they appear when coding other solutions in the Eclipse IDE. Finally, users can still easily add fields, parameters or other report elements to formulas by dragging and dropping the element from the Field Explorer view into the Formula Pane. This way the developer will never have the wrong syntax when referring to a specific report element.

(Click on the picture to see a larger version)

Finally, the last screenshot displays our Data Pane. This is the pane which report designers will use to create the field linking between the database tables residing in the report. Unlike a lot of other reporting solutions, Crystal Reports removes the complexity of hand-coding the SQL statement used in the report. Instead, the Crystal Reports engine will generate the required SQL based on the database joins established in the Data Pane and the database fields referenced in the report itself.

(Click on the picture to see a larger version)

I hope everyone is as excited as I am about this recent announcement. I encourage everyone to sign up to receive the preview release so that they can be informed as soon as the software is made available. As always, we encourage feedback and comments on all blogs we post.

Talk to you soon!

-Sean Johnson
Product Manager, Business Objects Corp.

News Reviews of the Crystal Reports for Eclipse Announcement

2005-11-09T12:18:00.000-08:00

Business Objects issued a press release on Tuesday November 8th announcing that we have joined the Eclipse Foundation as an add-in provider. We also announced that we would be releasing a Crystal Reports for Eclipse preview version in the coming weeks.

Here are few good articles:

Search Open Source interview with Mike Milinkovich from Eclipse

Computer Business Review Online from Madan Sheina: Business Objects Beefs Up Developer Support

ZD NET Australia: Eclipse Gets Crystal Reports Support

Welcome to Crystal Reports for Eclipse

2005-11-08T08:24:00.000-08:00

Welcome to the Crystal Reports for Eclipse Blog. It is with great pleasure that we announced today our membership as an Add-on Member of the Eclipse Foundation. We also announced today Crystal Reports for Eclipse. We will be releasing for download a preview version of Crystal Reports for Eclipse in calendar Q4. We welcome you to register today and we will let you know when you can start to download Crystal Reports for Eclipse.

Crystal Reports has a long history with the Developer Community going back even before the 1st bundle of Crystal Reports for Visual Basic over 10 years ago. We have stayed committed to the Developer Community and as the market has moved we have worked to follow the changing needs of developers. Inclusion of Crystal Reports® for Visual Studio .NET, Crystal Reports for Borland JBuilder, Crystal Reports® for IBM® Rational® Application Developer for WebSphere® Software (RAD), Crystal Reports® for BEA Weblogic Workshop and now our 100% Java version of Crystal Reports® for Eclipse provides the broadest IDE coverage for Java / .NET / and web services developers.

Whether you have existing Crystal Reports you want to leverage in your applications or you are wanting to build new reports for your application you will have the flexibility to do this with Crystal Reports for Eclipse. You will be able to leverage the preview to be able to quickly build a variety of reports without having to leave the Eclipse IDE. Crystal Reports for Eclipse has a rich set of functionality for the developer that will enable you to drag and drop fields, text objects, formula fields, cross tabs, charts, picture, boarders, and sub reports on to the canvas of the report. Whether it is a column reports of a sophisticated output you have the power and the flexibility to do this.

Over the coming months you will see lots of news as we make Crystal Reports for Eclipse available in the preview and get feedback from the community. I personally look forward to getting your feedback on Crystal Reports for Eclipse, as well as your suggestions on what we can do at Business Objects to better support you in building your applications.

Regards,

Tim Lang
VP Developer Marketing
Business Objects
tim.lang@businessobjects.com

Crystal Reports for Eclipse Preview Announcement

2005-11-08T04:40:00.000-08:00

Read the full press release here:

Pre-register for the preview release on the Business Objects Developer Zone Eclipse site at
www.businessobjects.com/eclipse

Business Objects Joins the Eclipse Foundation

2005-10-27T12:24:00.000-07:00

Business Objects has recently joined the Eclipse Foundation as an add-in provider.

Look for more information from us including a press release announcing the membership shortly.

Welcome to the Crystal Reports for Eclipse Blog

2005-10-26T10:01:00.000-07:00

This blog is where we'll share all the news, updates, and feedback on Crystal Reports and Eclipse.