Question

I have an application that uses Crystal Reports to display information entered on various forms. This application is on various clients laptops ranging all over in performance specs. On some laptops, Crystal Reports can take 30+ seconds before it shows the first report, then after that they generally open quicker.

How do I pre-start Crystal Reports when my application starts so load time of the initial report is quicker? The way I’m considering doing it now is open up an empty report minimized at start, then timing it to close.

Answer 1

Loading CR on a separate thread when the app is starting up worked for me.

        //preload crystal reports on a seperate thread
        Task.Factory.StartNew(() =>
            {
                try
                {
                    using (ReportDocument preloadCrystalReport = new ReportDocument())
                    {
                        preloadCrystalReport.Load(Path.Combine(AppDomain.CurrentDomain.BaseDirectory, "Reports/Report.rpt"));
                        PrintPreview preloadCrystalGUI = new PrintPreview().Init(preloadCrystalReport);
                        preloadCrystalGUI.Dispose();
                    }
                }
                catch (Exception e)
                {
                    \\log exception
                }

            }, TaskCreationOptions.LongRunning);

The PrintPreview class in my case is a dialog with the CR control embedded in it. I don’t display the dialog when preloading.

I found that preloading the .rpt file also helped with the user experience