PJ on Development: Blog

Today my boss asked me to build a report that needed to be printed from our web application.

So, me and my really stupid mouth said: "Sure, boss, I could use Crystal to build the report and then send a PDF to the browser." And everybody would be happy.

First a little explanation, the last time I have used Crystal Reports was the version shipped with VB3, almost 10 years ago. Back then it was a relatively good tool for creating reports, but sometimes we would just drop it and write the report by hand. On the good old days of Client-Server applications ;-)

Nowadays we don't have the luxury of having a connected printer on the client (because the client is the web browser) so the next best thing is a PDF that we send to the browser.

After this many years, I thouhgt that Crystal have evolved a little bit. And in fact it did.

But one thing remained... The damn dumb Saved Data.

Why?! In the name of the Lord, why?!

Why the developer of Crystal still needs to save data WITH the report?

It's just plain dumb.

I can't imagine one single reason for saving data with the report definition file.

Can anyone please tell me one, just ONE, single reason?