What is Business Views?

> What the heck is Business Views?? That's what I said to myself when I saw Business View Manager for the first time! So, don't worry if you haven't used Business Views or are just found out about it. It's pretty straight forward and easy. I learnt it in 15 minutes basically, simply by trying to create all the 5 Objects of this application, so can you!

Quick Intro: You can think of Business View Manager like an alternate mini version of Universe Designer. Just like you can throw in 10s of tables in Designer to create an Universe and use that universe to build DeskI or WebI reports, you can do the same thing using Business View Manager by throwing in 10s of tables or custom SQL to create a 'Business View' and use that in Crystal Reports. For the super geeks, please feel free to gobble up the Business Views™ Administrator's Guide and share with us your discoveries, thanks!

Video Walkthrough: How to use Business View Manager to create Dynamic List of Values and use them in Crystal Reports.

Topics Covered:
1) Introduction to Business View Manager, part of Business Objects XI R2/3.1.
2) How to create Data Connection, Data Foundation, Business Element, Business View and List of Values.
3) How to use List of Values in Crystal Reports to create cascading prompts.

Free Hand SQL: Crystal Reports and Static Parameters

Video - Topics covered

(This is a follow up video of our previous videos on Crystal Reports (Standard Report Wizard on Crystal Reports XIR2 and Static Parameters in Crystal Reports.)

1) How to create Crystal Reports using free hand SQL.

2) How to Create Static Parameter with Static List of Values. (again, using free hand SQL).

Static Parameters in Crystal Reports

Video - Topics covered:

This is a follow up video of our previous video on How to create Crystal report using Standard Report Wizard.

1) Static Parameters - Static parameters are used in prompts values or List of Values that do not change, or do not change frequently. For example, if a report requires a prompt to select a particular State, it would ideal to use a Static LOVs because the number of states is unlikely to change any time soon. Also, static parameters are very fast becuase all the LOVs are loaded in the report and Crystal Reports does not have to query the data source to retrieve the LOVs.

2) Static List of Values - used by Static parameters, can be retrieved and stored with Static Parameters created on a Crystal report using the 'Append All Database Values' feature. You can also import the LOVs from external text files or simply type your own LOVs.

Standard Report Wizard on Crystal Reports XIR2

Video - Topics covered:

1) Standard Report Wizard - How to create Crystal reports using database tables - i.e. simply dragging and dropping tables and joining them - much like in Designer creating universes.

2) Group Expert - as it's name suggests, this is an extended front end version of the 'group by' function of Crystal reports. Very easy to use and very useful. Those of you who write SQL a lot, know sometime it gets very painful when using Group By clause in your code. Not in Crystal Reports.

3) Design view - introduction to the sectional layout of Crystal reports, including Report Header, Page Headers, Group Headers (if you do not use any grouping in your report, you won't have Group Headers), Details - main data, Group Footers, Report Footers , Page Footer. So, it looks like this in Design view:

Report Header

Page Header

Group Header

DETAILS

Group Footer

Report Footer

Page Footer

4) Select Expert (Selection Formulas) - The name of this feature isn't very intuitive but this can be thought of as an extended front end of version of Where clause. We can restrict and manipulate data using this feature. For example, if we wanted to assign a custom Parameter/promot to an available field, we would use Record Selection Formulas.

5) Formula Workshop - Formula Editor Very intuitive. You can create all sorts of formulas using SQL or Crystal syntax. For example, UPPERCASE, NULL behaviors, data type conversions, mathematical calculations and so on.

How to Create a Simple Crystal Report using Free hand SQL