Crystal Reports 9.0 is the latest release of the flagship reporting product from Crystal Decisions. It's also one of the most significant releases the company has put out in recent years, with many new features and enhancements tied back to developer or user requests.

Crystal Reports 9.0 features an updated user interface for creating reports with features designed to enhance productivity. The most valuable new features are the new report templates and reusable components. For reports that need to have the same look and feel, you can create a report template with your own formatting and then apply it to your own reports. The process of creating a report template is a bit cryptic at first, but once you figure out how it works it should save many hours spent formatting two (or more) reports to look similar.

If you find you're frequently creating the same calculations over and over, you can now reuse report components very easily. Crystal Reports 9.0 has a new feature called the Crystal Repository that can store text, images, and custom functions you've created. By default, the repository is stored in a Microsoft Access database. The help text states that you can move the repository to another database, but doesn't provide details on how to move it. As a new feature, it has a lot of potential, but without tools to actually manage the repository and better integration with the user interface, it's not going to be that useful for larger organizations until the feature matures.

For organizations with a large number of reports, the combination of report templates and component reuse will mean less time spent developing reports and more consistent output across multiple reports. But you may spend some additional time working out how to use these features and, in particular for the new repository, spend time figuring out how to integrate them into your existing infrastructure.

With formulas, there's now a new Formula Workshop that can be used to create formulas without a single line of code. Unfortunately, the enhancements made to this area and to the new Expert are neither intuitive nor easy to use. You'd be better off just using the Formula Editor as with previous versions and writing your own formulas until you figure out how the new Formula Workshop operates.

Charting and exporting capabilities have also been extended, including enhancements to the exporting options for Excel — a report can now be exported and come across presentation quality within Excel. The export works well with a wide range of report types and formats and is sure to make even the most die-hard Crystal Reports developers happy.

Updated Components

Application developers should also be pleased with the new features. To start, Crystal Reports 9.0 now spans the major development platforms and ships Java, .Net, and COM SDKs — so regardless of your development platform, you can integrate Crystal Reports.

With this support for other platforms, Crystal Decisions has also upped the ante on the Visual Studio developer market. This release includes updated components for the version of Crystal Reports in Visual Studio. Net. The updates let developers preview reports from within Visual Studio. Net, which is a major enhancement over creating a report and then having to build an application to see how it looks. Developers now have more data sources and export formats for use in their .Net development, as well as printing functionality when viewing a report in a Web browser.

The tools for Java developers are just as rich; you can now report on a data set held within a JavaBean. Java developers no longer have to struggle with ODBC, database drivers, and so on. If your application has access to the data, Crystal Reports can now access that data as well.

This wide support for Java, .Net, and COM means that you can create a single report to deploy on any platform, which now includes mobile devices. Crystal Reports 9.0 also breaks the mold by allowing a report to be broken up and viewed as Report Parts. This capability lends itself to mobile devices and tighter integration with existing Web and Windows applications: Instead of having to view the entire report, you can now view just the chart or graph that's relevant to you or mix and match information from different reports.

Also new for this release is the ability to create guided navigation through reports or report parts. If users want to drill down on a graph, you can determine where that drill-down will take them. This feature could also benefit from a little more development — not so much on the functionality it provides, but on the setup for creating the navigation between objects. When done properly, navigation can be mapped to the decision-making process, and users should be able to find the information they need quickly without having to wade through multiple or huge reports.

The new Web viewers are zero client, meaning that nothing has to be installed on the client machine. You can combine multiple reports and information within your own corporate portal regardless of what portal or technology you're using. While other business intelligence vendors have scurried to create alliances with portal vendors and have tied their products to particular platforms, Crystal Decisions has taken the middle road and can easily be integrated into any Web-based portal using standards such as DHTML and XML.