Crystal Reports® for BEA WebLogic Workshop™ Release Notes

Document Date: September 2003

Welcome to Crystal Reports for BEA WebLogic Workshop. Crystal Reports for BEA WebLogic Workshop integrates Crystal Decisions' Java report processing and rendering capabilities with BEA WebLogic Workshop's Java Server Pages development environment. It allows you to quickly and simply add Crystal report viewing functionality to your J2EE applications, minimizing hand coding of data-connectivity and presentation formatting.

Please read this document in its entirety for updates and information on using this product.

A customized version of the Crystal Reports report designer is included with your copy of BEA WebLogic Workshop. To download the designer, you must complete the Crystal Reports for BEA WebLogic Workshop product registration.

For Crystal Care technical support, go to http://support.crystaldecisions.com/crystalcare/. We also offer a wide range of Crystal Reports training courses designed to build or enhance your existing skills at http://www.crystaldecisions.com/training/. For Crystal Consulting, visit http://www.crystaldecisions.com/consulting/.

This document includes the following topics:

- Restrictions
- Platform-Specific Issues
- Formatting and Rendering
- Relational Databases and SQL Statements
- Charting
- Report Functionality
- Viewer UI
- IDE Integration
- Documentation

Restrictions

The reporting component that processes reports, provided with Crystal Reports for BEA WebLogic Workshop, is restricted by key code to provide adequate performance for development, testing and deployment of limited reporting within applications. The following other restrictions apply to this version of Crystal Reports for BEA WebLogic Workshop:

- The Java Reporting Component will only process reports created using Crystal Reports 9 or 10. Reports from earlier versions of Crystal Reports should be converted using the Report Conversion tool available for download from Crystal Decisions.
- The Report Creation and Modification API for the Java Reporting Component are not exposed in this release.
- Report data that is saved along with the report template can be refreshed at runtime, but not saved with the report template. Data can only be refreshed and saved with the report template at design-time using the desktop report designer.
- Reports cannot be used that access the following data sources:

- Java Bean Driver
- Multiple data sources
- OLAP

- The following capabilities are not supported in this release:

- Hierarchical grouping
- RTF and HTML interpretation
- Horizontal page numbers
- Report templates
- Geographic mapping
- Gantt, Gauge, Funnel, and Numeric Axis charts
- Crystal Reports Repository
- Reports created with Report Application Server (RAS)
- Report parts
- Report alerts

Platform-Specific Issues

- On an AIX platform, the IBM JRE 1.4 uses the IPv6 extensions to the TCP/IP protocol. When refreshing a report, you need to set the java.net.preferIPv4Stack property in order to force the use of IPv4 protocols during the database connection: java -Djava.net.preferIPv4Stack=true <classname.class>
- On an AIX platform running IBM JDK 1.3.1 or 1.4, a bug in the JDK can cause reports to crash. As a workaround, set the environment JITC_COMPILEOPT to SKIP{com/crystaldecisions/reports/common/encryption/Processing}{processing}.
- When using Tomcat 4.1.24, embedded text objects are rendered as multiple instances of the first field in the embedded text objects. This does not occur in earlier or later versions.
- The BEA JRockit JVM has a parallel garbage collection option that causes out of memory exceptions when dealing with contiguous blocks of memory greater than 2 MB. As a workaround, increase the maximum heap size or switch to the generational copying garbage collector. To set the maximum heap size, use the "-XmxNNNm" option, where NNN is the size of the heap in MB. To use the generational copying garbage collector, use the "-Xgc:gencopy" option.
- A web application using the Java Reporting Component must be deployed as an exploded archive directory. BEA WebLogic Workshop, Apache Tomcat 4.1, and IBM WebSphere 5 are all capable of copying the WAR file to a location and creating an exploded archive directory at deployment time. To do this in WebLogic Workshop, set the web application to stage mode.
- Due to compatibility issues between BEA WebLogic Server 7.0 and Oracle, a blank screen is generated for reports viewed under this configuration.

Formatting and Rendering

- If a section or area of a report is suppressed, the newPageBefore and newPageAfter flags are not evaluated for that section or area. As a workaround, you can set the newPageBefore or newPageAfter flag on the next visible section; this is also true for a 0 height section.
- The currency symbol in a report floats even if the fixed position option is selected.
- The time and date format displayed in a report is based only on the default locale settings of the server.
- When viewing a report, if the report contains objects that cross a page boundary, the resulting page is displayed as two horizontal pages.
- When viewing a report in the viewer, text objects without spaces do not display if the width is too small. Increasing the width of the text object causes the report to be correctly displayed.
- The character spacing feature is not supported in this release. Character spacing applied to a text object is ignored.
- Due to limitations in HTML 4.0, the Round border style for a box object is displayed as a rectangle instead.
- When viewing a report in the viewer, column headings of a cross-tab may overlap or truncate.
- When viewing a report in the viewer, extra lines in the text field can appear. This occurs due to rounding up the conversion from twips to pixels. As a workaround, resize the section slightly.
- When exporting a report that has Arial Bold text formatting to PDF, you may get an error message when you open the PDF.

Relational Databases and SQL Statements

- When refreshing a BIT stored procedure report from a SQL Server or Sybase database, parameter fields become pull down menus with no default values. You cannot view the report if the report relies on parameter values.
- The Oracle JDBC driver does not support reports with BFILE data.
- The Oracle JDBC driver does not support interval data types.
- The Oracle JDBC driver does not support reports with UROWID data.
- The Sybase JDBC driver only allows up to 255 characters to be entered for fields of type char, varchar, and nvarchar. If you need to enter more than 255 characters in a field, use the text type instead.
- Earlier versions of the Sybase JDBC driver do not support reports with UNICHAR or UNIVARCHAR data. Use jConnect for JDBC version 5.5 ESD #9 or above.
- Reports with cyclic joins are not supported in this release. In addition, joins that require execution of independent queries, which are then later linked by some other set of tables, are not supported in this release.
- BLOB fields that are set to 'can grow' do not grow. For example, different sized images placed in BLOB fields with the 'can grow' property are rendered as the same size.
- When refreshing a stored procedure report from a SQL Server database, timestamp parameters should be in hexadecimal format.

Charting

- The chart legend can appear differently in the Crystal Reports Designer than in the viewer.
- When viewing a report with a cross-tab and a chart, the cross-tab will always appear over the chart regardless of the setting of the MoveToFront property for the cross-tab.
- The viewer does not display textures or pictures used as the background for charts.
- When viewing a report with a chart, the data label of the chart does not appear if it has a negative value.
- When viewing a chart that has an image split across multiple pages, the image can be incorrectly displayed. As a workaround, use the Keep Together flag on the image object to prevent splitting it across multiple pages.
- When viewing a chart in the viewer, the points on the lines of the graph are not displayed. The line is still displayed.

Report Functionality

- The Java Reporting Component uses a high resolution time and date format. Date and time functions can return a non-integer number of seconds.
- When using the ASC and CHR functions, a runtime error occurs if characters with a value outside 0-127 are used. The ASC and CHR functions have been deprecated, and so the ASCW and CHRW functions should be used in their place to avoid the runtime error with values outside 0-127. The ASC and CHR functions will not be supported in future versions.
- Only English locale datetime strings in the formula language are supported in this release.

Viewer UI

- When viewing a report, the Export and Print buttons are not shown by default. To enable the buttons, set the isOwnPage property to true.
- When exporting a report, if the user presses the browser refresh button after the report has been exported, the user will be prompted to export the report again.
- Text search always begins on the second page. In addition, text search only highlights the first instance of the search string on each page. For instance, if two instances of the search string occur on the current page, the first instance will be highlighted but searching again goes to the next page.

IDE Integration

- The log properties file points to $HOME/Crystal as a location to create log files. Since it does not exist, an error message is displayed. You should either create this directory, or modify the file to point to an existing directory.
- The viewer does not function if you manually delete CrystalReportEngine-config.xml from the classes folder. Creating new instances of the viewer using the wizard will not create a new copy of the XML file.
- CrystalReportEngine-config.xml is not found in the directory containing the JAR files. Instead, it is found in $BEA-HOME/weblogic81/workshop/thirdparty/crystal-reports-10.
- When launching the Crystal Reports designer to view a report within the IDE, the designer fails to find the report if the report name contains characters that are not available in the locale of the operating system. For example, on a system with English as the system locale, a report with Japanese characters in its name fails to load. As a workaround, open the report using the "Open File" menu item within the running designer.

Documentation

- When creating a Java Reporting Component report source, the path of the report can only be specified by using a relative URL. File path, UNC address, and relative file path are not supported.
- The Setting Up the Development Environment section of the Developer's Guide states that crystal-root is the directory where Crystal Reports for BEA WebLogic Workshop is installed. In a UNIX environment, crystal-root refers to the $HOME/crystalreports directory.

© 2003 Crystal Decisions, Inc.