Field Type Incorrect

[Former Member]

I have a Crystal XI R2 report that pulls from two Excel spreadsheets (also produced by Crystal) as the datasources. In one of the two spreadsheets, I have two running total formulas for amounts that a customer paid off on an account. The formulas export to Excel perfectly as numbers (and are truly formatted as numbers in both Crystal and Excel). However, when my third report goes and pulls the data from the first two reports, it thinks the two running totals are strings.

This is causing two problems - one is that I have to convert the values with tonumber() which I really shouldn't have to do. The other is that (and I'm not 100% sure this is related) I'm not getting any data whatsoever in those two fields in the third report - even though I can look at the data extract that the third report is pulling data from and see the values that should be there and should be included in the third report.

Any ideas?

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Hi Andrea

Can you please provide us the following information:

How are the two reports related to the third one? Are you using a subreport?

How are you trying to fetch data from the two reports? You could as well try to pull the data directly from the Excel sheet.

When you use the tonumber function, are you able to see the data?

Regards

Girish Bhosale

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Thank you for the response! I actually already resolved this. The issue was that the two fields coming in as strings were both running totals in the source reports (long story why I had to use two other reports at the source for this one). In any case, the issue was resolved by creating two new formulas in the source report that essentially simply referred back to the running totals but, by storing the values in separate formulas, for some reason Crystal was able to recognize that they were numbers and not strings.

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

I meant to answer your questions though (just for the sake of documenting this issue in case anyone else encounters it in the future):

How are the two reports related to the third one? Are you using a subreport?

The two reports are separate stand-alone reports that create data exports to Excel on a daily basis. The Excel files the two reports create are used as the datasource for the third report (it's a long story as to why, but suffice it to say that the first two reports are extremely complex and evaluate several different levels of data granularity, so it was going to be nearly impossible to do their calculations in the third report, it was more time-effective to use them as the source instead).

How are you trying to fetch data from the two reports? You could as well try to pull the data directly from the Excel sheet.

That's exactly what we're doing - which is part of why I thought the behavior was so strange.

When you use the tonumber function, are you able to see the data?

I actually did try this, and no, it didn't resolve the issue - I also thought that was strange.

Essentially, Crystal treated the values produced by the running totals as null values because it was seeing them as strings.