Introduction to Using Crystal Reports with ClearSCADA

This driver is a stand-alone driver. It provides additional functionality to enable ClearSCADA to interface with specific supported systems or devices. To interact successfully with such systems or devices, you need to:

• Install and run the driver
• Ensure that the driver is licensed
  
• Configure the required database items and settings on the driver
• Ensure that the database items (and any database items on which they depend) have valid, saved, configuration and are 'In Service'.

Intended Audience

This guide is intended for:

• Engineers who are responsible for:
  • Configuring ClearSCADA to interface with the third-party Crystal Reports™ application
  • Using the third-party Crystal Reports™ application to produce reports that contain ClearSCADA data.

  (Such engineers are expected to have the appropriate experience or knowledge of the Crystal Reports™ application.)

• Operators and engineers who work with the reports that contain ClearSCADA data
• System administrators who are investigating unexpected conditions related to the Crystal Reports driver.

Document Scope

This guide explains the configuration and features associated with ClearSCADA's Crystal Reports driver. The Crystal Reports driver enables ClearSCADA to interface with the third-party Crystal Reports™ application to produce professional customized reports that contain data from the ClearSCADA database.

You can use the Crystal Reports driver to enable ClearSCADA to interface with SAP Crystal Reports 2013 or SAP Crystal Reports 2016.

Crystal Reports is a powerful application that allows you to structure reports to your requirements. You can then generate and display your reports, print your reports out, or export your reports to a variety of formats and destinations for data analysis. For instance, you might want to transfer your reports to disk, or export reports in Adobe Acrobat^TM format and send them via e-mail to a system engineer or manager.

Much of the structure and layout of a report is performed using the Crystal Reports application. As such, we advise that any reports or report templates are produced by engineers that have the appropriate experience or knowledge of the Crystal Reports application.

The ClearSCADA Guide to the Crystal Reports Driver explains the ClearSCADA interface to the Crystal Reports application and the ClearSCADA specific features related to producing reports. You can use the ClearSCADA Crystal Reports driver to interface with SAP Crystal Reports 2013 or SAP Crystal Reports 2016. For more information on the version(s) of Crystal Reports and the editions that ClearSCADA supports, see Installation on ViewX Clients on Which You Want to Edit Reports.

This document explains how to:

• Install Crystal Reports
• Plan Your Reports
• Configure Your Reports (taking into account the Important Guidelines on Configuring and Generating Reports)
• Trigger Your Reports Automatically (see Activating a Report Action Automatically).

It also explains:

• Driver-specific aspects that are of interest to operators, including:
• Using Actions Associated with Crystal Reports
• Using the Crystal Reports Viewer
• Working with the Reports List.
• Driver-specific aspects that may be of interest to system administrators and engineers when investigating unexpected behavior relating to the Crystal Reports driver. The driver-specific aspects include:
• Crystal Reports Specific Status Display Attributes
• Crystal Reports Specific Colors
• Crystal Reports Specific Driver Log File Options
• Troubleshooting.

For information on using the Crystal Reports software or writing formulae to produce the reports you require, see the documentation supplied with the Crystal Reports application.