I was working with a Ripplestone client to get the software installed on a Vista PC and had a do a few things different than if this was XP Pro or Windows Server 2003.  The main differences were that Vista and Windows Server 2008 use IIS 7 and the .NET framework 1.1 is not installed by default.

I started with the following article on setting up Vista and Windows 2008 to run an ASP.NET 1.1 application.

Install ASP.NET 1.1 with IIS7

Once I got ASP.NET 1.1 installed and configured, I need to make sure that Crystal Reports was installed correctly with the Ripplestone installer.  This was just a matter of checking the permissions and testing the running of a report within Ripplestone.

All together it took an extra 30 minutes to get everything installed and configured correctly.

While working on the next version of Ripplestone, a client had asked about if and how Ripplestone will handle wildcard parameters in a Crystal Report.  I had not used wildcard parameters for a while, so I decided to dig in and build some reports with wildcard parameters and see how they worked when published to Ripplestone.

Creating the Crystal Report

For the report, I made a simple report that would have a parameter for a last name.  The report would use this parameter in the record selection and allow the user to enter wildcards in the format of “LY*” or “LY??” and have the report retrieve records for all the last names that either begin with LY or have four characters in the last name and they begin with LY.

To begin, I created the parameter with the settings to Allow custom values and Allow discrete values set to True.

Next I created the selection using the Select Expert and using the field called BillingLastName set the selection type to be “is like” and used the parameter called LastName as the value.

Running the report within Crystal Reports the user will get a parameter prompt and I entered the value of “LY*”.

The results from this simple report display all the records from the table where the last name begins with “LY”

Publish and Run the Report in Ripplestone

After creating the report in Crystal Reports, it is time to publish the report in Ripplestone and see how the wildcard parameters work.

Publishing the report was the same as any other report, select the report and give it a title click the Publish button.  Once the report was published I clicked the Run Report link and got the parameter page.  The page prompts for the last name and once again I entered “LY*” for the value.  Clicking the Run Report button will then pass the value to the report and the report will refresh the data for the report (in this case the data source was SQL Server) and display the report to the user within their web browser.

The report is returned as a pdf in the web browser.  The Crystal Report uses the wildcard parameter the same when running from Ripplestone as it does when running directly from the Crystal Report designer.

The Problem

There are times when building a Crystal Report that you want a field to be short and if the data is too long for the field for it to be truncated.  This works fine when developing the report in the Crystal Reports Designer, but when you publish the report to Ripplestone and run the report the data in the field will overlap with the field(s) to the right. 

The screenshot below is from the Crystal Reports Web Viewer and the HTML that is generates allows the data to “spill-over” to the two fields to the right of the Title field.

What you want it to look like is this.  The screen shot below is the same report, but the viewer in Ripplestone was changed to pdf.  When exporting to pdf Crystal Reports does the proper thing and truncates the data in the Title field to the length that was set at design time.

The Solution

To fix the problem we need to head back to the Crystal Reports Designer and make a change to the field that is overflowing (the Title field in the example).  Open the Format Editor by right clicking on the field and selecting the Format Field option.  On the Common tab we want to check the Can Grow option and set the Maximum number of lines to 1.

After making the change to the report you can re-publish the report to Ripplestone and the field should be truncated and will fit the set width.  Below is the report in the Crystal Reports web viewer after the Can Grow option has been checked.

Conclusion

If you have a field in a Crystal Report that needs to be a specified width and cannot flow over to other fields and you need to view the report in the Crystal Reports Web Viewer you will need to set the Can Grow option along with the Maximum number of lines option.  Setting these two options in the Crystal Reports designer and then publishing that report to Ripplestone will cause the field to be truncated when displayed with the Crystal Reports Web Viewer.

Thanks to Patrick Kansa for help with this solution.