Crystal Report Viewer integration with Sharepoint 2010

Question

We had a requirement in our project to view crystal report off an hyper link embedded into sharepoint web part developed using ASP .NET. The report accepted few parameters from the sharepoint page and passed those on to the SQL server to retrive data and
display the data in the report. The challenge was to open the report in the web browser.
The first difficulty was to find the right control to use, the report viewer tool that comes with Visual Studio 2010 is not the right one to use to view Crystal reports, I realised this after spending half a day trying to figure out why wouldn't the report
load. I then downloaded the Crystal Report Viewer for VS 2010 Standard from http://www.businessobjects.com/jump/xi/crvs2010/us2_default.asp. After you install this, you get the crystal report viewer in your toolbar. All you have to do is drag and drop it on
to the web part and configure it to use your report. If any one needs help with this let me know I will show how to do that.
So far so good. The biggest challenge was to deploy this on to the production server which took better part of 3 days to figure out how its done. If you deploy the WSP file as it is expecting that the crystal DLLs would be embedded in it then be ready to
expect a rude shock because it isn't. Here are the steps -
1. Deploy the WSP to the sharepoint server
2. Install the crystal dlls used in the project (CrystalDecisions.CrystalReports.Engine.dll, CrystalDecisions.ReportSource.dll, CrystalDecisions.Shared.dll, CrystalDecisions.Web.dll) into the GAC using GacUtil command
3. Add following entries to Web.Config file (C:\inetpub\wwwroot\wss\VirtualDirectories\80\web.congif)
    <SafeControl Assembly="CrystalDecisions.CrystalReports.Engine, Version=13.0.2000.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=692fbea5521e1304" Namespace="CrystalDecisions.CrystalReports.Engine" TypeName="*" Safe="True" SafeAgainstScript="False"
/>
      <SafeControl Assembly="CrystalDecisions.ReportSource, Version=13.0.2000.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=692fbea5521e1304" Namespace="CrystalDecisions.ReportSource" TypeName="*" Safe="True" SafeAgainstScript="False" />
      <SafeControl Assembly="CrystalDecisions.Shared, Version=13.0.2000.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=692fbea5521e1304" Namespace="CrystalDecisions.Shared" TypeName="*" Safe="True" SafeAgainstScript="False" />
      <SafeControl Assembly="CrystalDecisions.Web, Version=13.0.2000.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=692fbea5521e1304" Namespace="CrystalDecisions.Web" TypeName="*" Safe="True" SafeAgainstScript="False" />
4. Install crystal redistributable package which can be downloaded from http://www.businessobjects.com/jump/xi/crvs2010/us2_default.asp (
SAP Crystal Reports runtime engine for .NET Framework 4 (64-bit))
5. Copy aspnet_client folder from C:\>inetpub\wwwroot and overwrite it on C:\>inetpub\wwwroot\wss\VirtualDirectories\80
And we are done. Fingers crossed it should all work.
Prasad Matkar MCP, MCTS

Answer 1

Hi Mahesh,
How are you loading the report in your webpart? This is what I have done. I have tried to explain what I am doing in the program comments. Hope this helps. Good luck.
                SPSite mySite = new SPSite(SPContext.Current.Site.Url.ToString());
                SPWeb thisSite = mySite.OpenWeb();
                // Writing to event log after every step in debug mode so that you get to know if there was a failure what step the failure occured after.
                EventLog.WriteEntry("Reports", "Inside PAge Load ", EventLogEntryType.Error);
                SPFolder folder = thisSite.GetFolder("Reports");
                if (folder.Exists)
                    // get collection of Crystal Reports rpt files in the document library
                    SPFileCollection files = folder.Files;
                    // open the rpt file and get the contents
                    SPFile srcfile = files[reportToLaunch];
                    byte[] content = srcfile.OpenBinary();
                    // make a temporary folder
                    DirectoryInfo dir2 = new DirectoryInfo("~/temp");
                    if (!dir2.Exists)
                        dir2.Create();
                    if (File.Exists("~/temp/temp.rpt"))
                        File.Delete("~/temp/temp.rpt");
                    // write the report definition to a temporary file
                    // EventLog.WriteEntry("Reports", "Before Creating temp report ", EventLogEntryType.Error);
                    //EventLog.WriteEntry("Reports", "Before Create ", EventLogEntryType.Error);
                    BinaryWriter bw =
                      new BinaryWriter(File.Open("~/temp/temp.rpt", FileMode.Create));
                    bw.Write(content);
                    bw.Close();
                  //  EventLog.WriteEntry("Reports", "After Create ", EventLogEntryType.Error);
                    // set up the crystal report
                    ReportDocument reportDoc = new ReportDocument();
                    reportDoc.Load("~/temp/temp.rpt");
                    EventLog.WriteEntry("Reports", "after report load ", EventLogEntryType.Error);
                    ConnectionInfo connection = new ConnectionInfo();
                    connection.ServerName = "SQLServerName";
                    connection.DatabaseName = "SQLDatabase";
                    connection.UserID = "sqluser";
                    connection.Password = "sqlpassword";
                    TableLogOnInfo logon = new TableLogOnInfo();
                    logon.ConnectionInfo = connection;
                    reportDoc.SetParameterValue("@Parameter1", parameter1);
                    reportDoc.SetParameterValue("@Parameter2", parameter2);                                               
                    EventLog.WriteEntry("Reports", "after assigning parameters ", EventLogEntryType.Error);
                   foreach (CrystalDecisions.CrystalReports.Engine.Table t in reportDoc.Database.Tables)
                        t.ApplyLogOnInfo(logon);
                    EventLog.WriteEntry("Reports", "after applying login info ", EventLogEntryType.Error);
                    // and the Crystal report Viewer                                    
                    CrystalReportViewer1.ReportSource = reportDoc;
                    EventLog.WriteEntry("Reports", "Before delete ", EventLogEntryType.Error);
                    // clean up
                    File.Delete("~/temp/temp.rpt");
                    EventLog.WriteEntry("Reports", "after delete ", EventLogEntryType.Error);
Prasad Matkar MCP, MCTS