Chad Petrovay

Tag: Crystal Reports

  • Building Dynamic Reports for TMS with Crystal Reports

    Building Dynamic Reports for TMS with Crystal Reports

    Like many other institutions, The Morgan Library and Museum utilizes TMS to generate reports using templates prepared in Crystal Reports. But the reports and forms we desire most – loan agreements, condition reports, and exhibition checklists – need to be highly dynamic. Instead of typesetting each block of text or every checkbox, the Morgan leverages Crystal Reports’ powerful capabilities to make reports dynamic, flexible and easy to maintain. This presentation dissects some of our most complicated reports to look at the underlying structures and formulae.

    Presented at Collective Imagination. 6-8 December 2017, Los Angeles, CA.
    Presented as a webinar for Gallery Systems. 25 April 2018.

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  • Highlight Alternate Rows in Crystal Reports

    Highlight Alternate Rows in Crystal Reports

    I’m sure there are many of us who remember the green bar continuous form paper that spewed out of the old dot matrix printers. The horizontal green bar assisted the reader with following a line of text across the page. Often a horizontal line is used in Crystal Reports for the same purpose. But there are times that I find that these lines just add more black ink to the page – and that instead of making it easier to read, actually make it harder. Instead, I’m going to use a background color to highlight alternate rows, and create a differentiation between my records.

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  • Giving Users More Than an Empty Report

    Giving Users More Than an Empty Report

    Occasionally, using an INNER JOIN or selection criteria in Crystal Reports, can result in an empty recordset and a blank report. For instance your user may be trying to run an accessioning report on unaccessioned objects, or a valuation report on records that have never had values entered into the system. These scenarios could create frustrations for users who may not understand why their report is blank, but there is a simple solution to avoid that blank sheet of paper.

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  • Code Golf: Count formula

    Code Golf: Count formula

    Time to play a little code golf, where we try to find the shortest possible source code to accomplish a given task. I’m going to be taking on a formula in Crystal Reports that changes a running total {#Count} into a text string to be used as a line label. The string should be formatted with an numeral followed by a period.

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  • Advanced Crystal Reports: Techniques for compiling Annual Reports and other statistics

    Advanced Crystal Reports: Techniques for compiling Annual Reports and other statistics

    The interplay between Crystal Reports and TMS can help database administrators streamline reporting needs, and provide powerful statistical updates to museum administrators. This presentation covers some techniques for building such valuable reports.

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