Whats New in Crystal Reports 2008 V1?

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Whats New in Crystal Reports 2008 V1

Crystal Reports 2008 V1 is also known as Crystal Reports 2008 SP1.  Specifically 'V1' is the full build version, and 'SP1' is the incremental patch that takes a customer from Crystal Reports 2008 V0 to Crystal Reports 2008 V1.

We’re continuing to add value to the Crystal Reports 2008 ecosystem with the release of our first service pack.  This service pack coincides with the release of BusinessObjects Enterprise XI 3.1. Customers that are using XI 3.1 should also use Crystal Reports 2008 V1 for report design because they share the same reporting engine.

So what's new?

Support for Adobe Reader 9 and PDF Exporting with Embedded Flash

This feature enables Flash that is embedded in Crystal Reports 2008 files that share data with the Crystal Reports to be exported to PDF, and continue to be interactive within the PDF!

The sliders and dials within the PDF are live and dynamic just as they are within the Crystal Report.
To do this, you must be using Crystal Reports 2008 V1 and Adobe Reader 9.

Crosstabs as DHTML Tables for Improved Accessibility

This new feature is important, but very easy to miss.  Prior to V1, all crosstabs were rendered by the DHTML viewer as a series of

tags that were independently located on the HTML page.  This had the downside of making it very difficult to read by screen reading technology such as JAWS. 
Now, when the viewer renders a crosstab object, a DHTML tag and associated tags is wrapped around the

objects making them readable by screen readers.  This approach keeps the formatting and positioning flexibility of

s, while improving accessibility.
This feature is on by default, and applies to both the Crystal Reports 2008 .Net WebForm viewer, and the Java DHTML viewer in BusinessObjects Enterprise XI 3.1.  It will also be in the upcoming Crystal Reports for Eclipse 2.0 release planned for Q1 2009.

No need to turn off DEP when working with Visual Studio on Windows Vista

In Crystal Reports 2008 and Crystal Reports 2008 V0, a developer wanting to work with Microsoft Visual Studio on Windows Vista first had to turn off the OS feature called DEP.  Now with V1, we support running the embedded Visual Studio designer on Windows Vista with DEP on.

Unicode UFL Interface

In the ‘better late than never’ category, we have delivered Unicode compliant UFL interface.  This allows customers to write custom functions in COM or .net and invoke them from the Crystal Reports formula language.  Now Unicode strings can be passed back and forth across the Unicode interface.
This enables some interesting use cases for translation of text.  Now a formula in the report can invoke the UFL to do text lookups and access external string resources.  The UFL then passes the translated text back to the report.
I’ll be going into more detail on this feature with a sample in .Net in a future blog post.

Full Dual Monitor Support

Also in the ‘better late than never’ category is full dual monitor support.  While we made some improvements in our support for dual monitors in the original release of Crystal Reports 2008, we completed the work in this service pack.

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