I use CR 2008 v12 Developer version on a daily basis. Reports, sub-reports and functions in Crystal syntax. Grouping and summaries. And all that jazz. All fed in through a universe layer that talks to a SQL database.
However, when I run into issues I see threads on SO and elsewhere that make it sound like I’m using an entirely different program than others. Honestly – I don’t know what specific question(s) to ask, but can someone explain the true CR potential? I pretty much just export/schedule PDFs through it. How does ASP/C# come into play? Can I interface report prompts with PHP somehow?
First, ASP.NET (C#, VB, etc.) come into play because Crystal provides .Net assemblies to allow you to manually work with Crystal Reports via code. It should be noted, that not everything you can do in the Crystal Reports IDE can be done through code because they haven’t exposed everything (for instance, there are some settings you just have to go through the IDE for to set in the report that you can’t do from a program).
So, for example, I use use the .Net assemblies with Crystal because their viewer doesn’t work for me when deploying over the web (we have custom security model integrated with an Active Directory that is very particular). We also built in our own load balancing modules that can determine where the report should be run. The .Net assemblies will allow you to programatically do things like read parameters in, set parameters, export to file or to an HTTP response stream in a web request, change connection information at runtime, change database information at runtime, etc. Perhaps you want to write your own scheduling engine because of a security need, you would be able to use these to do that.