Crystal Reports 11

[Former Member]

We are running Crystal Reports 2011 SP11 update 14.0.11.1696. We have had a couple users report that Crystal crashes when exporting reports to PDF or Excel Spreadsheet. Has anyone else experienced this and what was the solution? Thank you.

[Former Member]

I had a similar problem on a number of computers recently, all running Windows 7 64-bit.  After a recent Windows update, some of the system fonts such as Arial get updated.  This prevents the export to PDF from including them and generates the errors "Failed to Export Report" if I use the export to PDF menu option from the ActiveX report viewer, and "Method ~ of ~" failed if I try to export to PDF from code.  Replacing the Arial fonts from a computer that had not run Windows updates in a while fixed the problem.  Also changing the font in the report to Tahoma fixed it as well.

[Former Member]

Just so this thread doesn't get buried, does anyone have any recommendations so that we can fix this? Any help would be much appreciated.

[Former Member]

Can you be a little more specific?

always crashes on specific reports only or just on some reports sometimes?  

every user or just a few users because they are the only ones who export from that report.

Can you duplicate these issues?

Are those users on different OS'.  

Have you watched this happen to confirm that they are properly exporting?

When I get reports of  " a few users sometimes get errors "  that I can't replicate, I tend to think operator error before report problems.

......    and any time someone is exporting data from a report I always ask what they are doing with the data and ask if this is something that the report should be doing in the first place.   

Sometimes they have a legit reason,  but often I find that they are doing further sorting or analysis that the report could easily do instead.  

Ted

[Former Member]

Thanks for your reply Ted.

Crystal seems to crash when exporting from specific reports

I have only a couple of people that are experiencing this however we have 10+ workstations with the same version of Crystal that aren't experiencing this.

I can duplicate this on the persons workstation with the report which they are experiencing the problem with.

Everyone is using Windows 7 32bit.

I have watched them and they are exporting correctly.

[abhilash_kumar]

And how many records does this report return?

Do all the workstations have the same printer drivers?

-Abhilash

[Former Member]

I'm with Abhilash.    I would look for difference in the workstation as the source.     what's different on those workstations?      all the same fonts loaded?     Do the users all have the proper permissions?

Anything unusual about those reports?      Do the report have Bar codes?     If so make sure barcode fonts are loaded.

Can the users who are experiencing the crashes log into one of those systems that don't crash and then see the issue??    If so, It's a more likely a permissions issue.

If not   then look further into hardware / configuration differences.

[Former Member]

Since the issue affects a variety of reports the return record count varies quite a lot.

Some have a couple of extra drivers for different printers but for the most part they have the same printer drivers.

[Former Member]

We are getting the user to re-create the report from scratch. We'll see how that goes and update the thread. Thanks for your responses so far.

[former_member292966]

Hi,

If it's only a few people experiencing then I don't think it's the reports.  Can they preview the reports fine?  Is it specific reports or all reports that get exported? 

I think you're on the correct track to see what's different with these users, ie. environment, local permissions, local resources, database permissions. 

If the reports can be previewed and only crash during export then we can eliminate the database and report out completely, because the report works.  Then we can focus on the exporting part.  The difference between previewing and export are usually resources.  Exporting requires permissions to the working temp folder and obviously to the folder they are saving the reports to. 

Because the crash happens with different formats, PDF and Excel, that also indicates to me the problem may lie outside of Crystal itself.  Those export types don't have a lot in common outside of the Print Engine. 

Ted's suggestion of having one of these users log onto a working machine is valid.  This will tell us if the problem is user or machine specific.  Also do the reverse, have someone that does work try it on a non-working machine. 

Are these reports being run in Crystal or an application?  I'd be interested in knowing as well if uninstalling and reinstalling Crystal or your application would fix the problem. 

Good luck,

Brian

[former_member183750]

You've got some excellent suggestions here. Other things that may be in play:

If the report uses default printer driver, is the printer driver the same on all user's computers?

Is the printer driver the same version?

What is the database and is the same version client installed?

Try export to MS Doc format. Does that work? (Doc, xls, pdf all use the same function internally so theoretically you should be seeing the same issue)

Export to TXT / CSV - does that work? (This uses a different function internally.)

Is printing consistently good?

Define crashes: Actual error (if any) - screenshot would be good - or does the designer just close and disappear?

- Ludek

Senior Support Engineer AGS Product Support, Global Support Center Canada

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