Creating reports based on SAP BW InfoProviders in BO Crystal Reports

As probably many of you I have approached BO tools in order to obtain basic feeling about it since especially reporting tools are going to replace our famous BEx tool as depicted in BI roadmap published by SAP. In this post I’m focused on pure reporting part of BO which is represented by tool called Crystal Reports (CR) 2008. Crystal Reports is software originally created about year 1990 by company called Crystal Services which was bought by Seagate Technology in 1994. Seagate renamed its software unit at that time as Crystal Decisions which was attained by Business Objects (BO) in 2003; finally BO was taken over by SAP in 2008. Since that time BO stood as an industry standard in category of reporting software as it is bundled with several major development tools.

Let’s start with software that I used. A reporting tool as it self I downloaded as a copy of 30 day evaluation version from official SAP.com pages. Then I needed a tool called BusinessObjects Integration Kit for SAP - Crystal Reports 2008 which is downloadable from SDN.

Crystal reports are to be created out of Crystal Reports 2008 but you need to have an info provider out of BW that is supplying data for “Crystal Reports” based report.  In my case I used normal BW query created in BW by BEx. BW query is created prior to use to create report in Crystal Reports. You have to enable your query to allow external access to query. You set this as a check box on query properties in BEx Query Designer.

 

1. Open CR 2008, there is a Crystal Reports toolbar specific to BW. 

  

2. Create a blank report via menu File-> New-> Blank Report -> BW system connected to CR is displayed and all queries from BW system are listed, pick up your BW query which will be served as base query fro your CR query:

 

3. Follow wizard in order to select fields that you want to display in CR query and other settings for CR query.

4. Adjust layout and other settings of your CR query in CR 2008. Data is automatically refreshed with data taken from BW server any time you open CR2008 tool.

Query output in BEx Analyzer:

  

Query output in CR2008: