When I first started supporting Crystal Reports and its SDKs, I specialized in some of the lesser used developer tools such as Delphi, PowerBuilder, Visual FoxPro, Dbase, Paradox and a few others.
Last year when SAP acquired Sybase I took a look into what was happening with PowerBuilder and saw it was up to version 12 and it could create WPF .NET forms. After doing some testing I have been able to get our WPF viewer to work with PowerBuilder .NET and it was actually pretty easy, but there are some things you need to be aware of:
- You need to use Crystal Reports for Visual Studio 2010 service pack 1 which is the first release of our WPF control that works in PowerBuilder.
- To obtain our SDK you need to install Crystal Reports for Visual Studio 2010 which has a prerequisite on the Visual Studio (VS) 2010. If you do not have VS 2010 you can install the VS 2010 Shell (Integrated) Redistributable Package then install Recent Service Packs. Note: Just installing the redistributables doesn't seem to work as I was unable to find a way to get PowerBuilder to reference objects from the GAC (WindowsAssembly directory).
- We have never officially tested our .NET SDK in PowerBuilder .NET. This means there could be some supportability issues with this. Issues or bugs that are found with PowerBuilder will need to be duplicated by us in C#, or VB .Net. For the most part a bug found in a .NET language will exhibit the behaviour in all .NET languages, however after 14 years supporting various compilers; I can tell you that this is not always the case.
- If working with support through the forums or through a phone case the person you are speaking to may have never even heard of PowerBuilder. In general this should not be an issue as they do know our SDK and can help with it and provide VB or C# examples for it.
- The Crystal Reports for Visual Studio 2010 report designer works only in Visual Studio 2010. If you do not have this then you will need one of our stand alone designers to build your reports.
For the experienced PowerBuilder developer, you will already know how to create a project, WPF Windows and add controls to the window. The WPF control that you want to add is under WPF components and is called CrystalReportsViewer from the namespace SAPBusinessObjects.WPF.Viewer.
You can find resources and info on using our SDK here: Crystal Reports and Enterprise .NET developer resources
For those less experienced with PowerBuilder, like me, or wanting more details I will be posting a blog shortly, hopefully this week, with step by step instructions on creating a simple Crystal Reports PowerBuilder .NET application.
Happy Spring
