Crystal Reports Merge Module and PDF Export

[Former Member]

Hi there! I have a question about installing my program with Crystal Reports as our reporting tool. Currently, I'm installing our program(VB.NET, .NET 4.5.2 framework, entity 6, WiX installer) and I use a merge module (CRRuntime13_0_13.msm) inside the installer to allow us to view many crystal reports inside our program. Everything seems to work fine(as far as viewing the report) when we are running the application on a deployment machine. What fails, though, is the exporting to PDF(which is a huge need for us) and maybe a few other formats. If I download and run the CrystalRuntime13_0_13.msi....it seems to work perfectly fine, export and all! Is there anyway to get this functionality with the merge module or do I have to install the runtime? Also, on a side topic...can someone explain to me if there is any difference between doing a merge module over runtime or runtime over merge module? Does it mess with any other version of crystal or anything like that?

Thanks in advance!

Josh W.

[former_member183750 · Accepted solution]

Hi Josh

Without actually describing the issue, it's pretty hard to troubleshoot it. E.g.; all I know is that you are not able to export to pdf. But why not? Errors? Behavior? Symptom?

Taking a shot in the dark, and considering your statement re MSM / MSI, I believe you are missing the VC++ dependencies. Thee are included in the MSI, bit due to licensing issues they are not part of the MSM. See KBA 1531409 - How to deploy the CRVS2010 runtime when using merge modules?

You may also want to consider updating to SP 14 (but this is not related to your issue - SP 13 was rather weak, so just for stability reasons...)

- Ludek

Senior Support Engineer AGS Product Support, Global Support Center Canada

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[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Hi there! sorry i did not describe the issue, I did not even realize it. My issue is, in our program, we view an external crystal report(Crystal XI) inside a crystal viewer. The crystal viewer has an export button on it, if we allow it, that you can export to multiple formats. When i click the export to PDF button, type in my file name and click export....my program becomes instantly unresponsive and have to force close the program through task manager. I have narrowed it down to exporting to PDF and a few other formats. There is no error message, no nothing except my program goes grey and says, PROGRAM NOT RESPONDING, go to the internet for help. If i do not use the export functionality...printing/viewing works like a charm.

As a note, before i left from work i just randomly went and downloaded the 13_0_14 runtime and put that into my installer to see if by happen stance that would take care of it. i built the installer, installed the program, and quickly ran 2 test...one as a .rpt export and the other as .pdf export...and it seemed to work, i'll fill this discussion in some more tomorrow after extensive testing.

Also, i was already installing the VC++ 2005 Redistributable before hand. Without that piece, I was never even able to view the report. It just failed giving me an error message of something, cant remember exactly. This is just reference for anyone else that is reading this for answers.

Thanks again!

Josh

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

as an update for my PDF export issue, By switching out the merge module to 13_0_14 seemed to take care of my issue. I've run through multiple tests in our program where I export manually and programmatically export and it works fine!

There must be an issue with the 13_0_13 export dll's inside the module.

[former_member183750 · Accepted solution]

Great news Josh. Admittedly SP 13 was probably the weakest SP we have released, but I never encountered the issue you describe with it. Still, happy to see SP 14 got it to work and many thanks for letting us know.

Happy coding,

- Ludek