SAP BI 4.3 SP2: What’s New in Crystal Reports

OData V4 as a Source for Crystal Reports 2020

You can easily create a report on top of an OData V4 service in Crystal Reports 2020.

In Crystal Reports 2020 Designer, click File -> New -> Standard Report…, Report Creation Wizard will appear, where you can find the new connectivity type: OData.

Below sample OData V4 URL was prefilled in the logon dialog (no credential required), to help users get familiar with this new data source quickly.

https://services.odata.org/V4/Northwind/Northwind.svc/

Click Finish, you can now find list of available tables (EntitySets) within this OData service.

You may noticed there are tables like ‘Customers/Orders’, where ‘Orders’ is a navigation table for ‘Customers’ table. Navigation tables could be handled with OData $expand command, thus could be used together with their main table, e.g. ‘Customers’ and ‘Customers/Orders’ could be used in one report with no performance concern.

Complex Type and collections are also listed as sub tables, they could also be used together with their main OData table. E.g. ‘People’, ‘People/AddressInfo’ (Complex type) and ‘People/Emails’ (collections) from below sample service could be used together.

https://services.odata.org/V4/TripPinService/

However, other irrelevant tables shouldn’t be used in one report, otherwise performance issue will occur.

Click Next, choose fields you want to use in the report. You may also add grouping, filtering, sorting etc using the report creation wizard, as what you could normally do on any data source. Click Finish, data will be fetched and the draft report will show up.

Whenever possible, Crystal Reports 2020 will push down column selection (via $select), sorting (via $orderby) and filters down to the OData service.

If any of above operation is not supported by the OData service (e.g. 1 of 3 filters), Crystal Reports will try to remove the problematic operation (e.g. a filter), and retry.

This report could be saved to BI Platform, you can view / schedule it as usual there.

For more information, see Using OData data sources.

Also, as a relevant new feature, please note Crystal Reports 2020 reports could be exposed as OData V4 since BI 4.3 SP00. See Crystal Reports 2020 OData Service on recurring schedules – SAP Help Portal.

XLSX (page-based) exporting option added to various Crystal Reports SDKs

For both Crystal Reports 2020 and Crystal Reports for Enterprise report, OpenDocument URL with sOutputFormat=E option now generates XLSX output. For more information, see sOutputFormat.

For Crystal Reports 2020 reports, the XLSX (page-based) exporting option has been added to the Report Application Server (RAS) Java and .NET SDKs, as well as Crystal Reports (CR) .NET SDK. See the respective SDK’s developer guides and API references for more details.

For Crystal Reports for Enterprise reports, the XLSX (page-based) exporting option is added in Crystal Reports for Enterprise Restful SDK. For more information, see Exporting.

Security and platform updates

Various security updates have been applied, including third party and open source component updates.

New Platforms versions and Data source versions have been certified, check out latest BI 4.3 Product Availability Matrix for more information.