Question

I have an application that uses the Crystal Report COM SDK to create and manipulate reports against a Crystal Enterprise 10 repository. I would like to upgrade from Crystal Enterprise 10 to BusinessObjects XI and try to minimize changes to the existing application. I remember that the initial BusinessObjects XI release had a COM SDK provided but I am uncertain of the current status.

What is the last release of BusinessObjects XI that provides a COM SDK? Is that version of BusinessObjects Enterprise still available and is the COM SDK still supported?

Answer 1

Business Objects XI 3.1 does not include the COM SDK. It appears that the last release to include the COM SDK was Business Objects XI R2 whose extended support expires in June 2011.

Update: I have finally got my hands on the bits and, even though the formal COM SDK is no more, the actual implementation of (most of?) the .NET SDK actually uses COM objects for the implementation. Code written against the COM SDK looks like it will still run on BOXI 3.1 although it may not be supported. One exception to this appears to be the COM viewers which do not exist any more in BOXI 3.1.

Update Again: It seems that many (most?) of the .NET SDK classes actually inherit from System.__ComObject. e.g. the documentation states the definition as:

public class ReportTemplateClass  : __ComObject,  
                                   ISCRReportTemplate, 
                                   ReportTemplate 

A quick look in Reflector shows that these assemblies only contain metadata so they appear to be interop assemblies.

Another Update Again: I did a quick test and the application seems to work after installing the .NET SDK but instantiating objects as COM objects (and not .NET). This was a quick test so I’m not sure if everything is working plus I’m pretty sure that you probably wouldn’t get support for that approach so I wouldn’t recommend it.