Explaining Crystal Reports Services

Crystal Reports 2025 reports are dedicated for users willing to work on operational reporting, with a lot of details and pages. Whereas Web Intelligence documents are used by many business users, an alternative report can be generated using Crystal Reports 2025. In Europe, Web Intelligence is mostly used, compared to North America where Crystal Reports can be more used in companies.

Definition:

There is only one version of Crystal Reports:

• Crystal Reports 2025 C++-based application on the client desktop for report designers.

Note

Former Crystal Reports for Enterprise client and server is now discontinued and is not available anymore in SAP BusinessObjects BI Platform 2025.

Crystal Reports 2025 desktop client provides to report designers a more technical graphic user interface than with the Web Intelligence's graphic user interface. On the server side, Crystal Reports 2025 reports consume dedicated Crystal Reports 2025 servers and services for processing incoming requests from users and designers.

Definition:

• Administrators need to configure and maintain the Crystal Reports 2025 services to ensure the proper functioning of the reporting environment. 
• This task includes settings related to server configuration, database connections, and other system parameters.
• The following services are running for Crystal Reports:
  • Crystal Reports DSL Engine Service: Provides Dimensional Semantic Layer (DSL) services to Crystal Reports 2025.
  • Crystal Reports 2025 Processing Service: Accepts and processes Crystal Reports 2025 reports, and can also share data between reports to reduce the number of database accesses.
  • Crystal Reports 2025 Viewing and Modification Service: Processes viewing and modification requests for Crystal Reports 2025 reports.
  • Crystal Reports Cache Service: Limits the number of database accesses generated from Crystal reports and speeds up reporting by managing a cache of reports.

Crystal Reports 2025 reports consume dedicated Crystal Reports 2025 servers and services for processing incoming requests from users and designers. Crystal Reports 2025 Report Application Server (RAS) and Crystal Reports 2025 Processing Server are used for designing reports, retrieving data and generating EPF files for requested pages.

Crystal Reports 2025 Report Application Server (RAS):

• The Crystal Reports 2025 Report Application Server (RAS) is both a server that manages the delivery of reports (and as such handles its own page caching) and an SDK that allows you to create and modify reports at runtime.
• The Report Application Server SDK allows applications to open, create, and modify existing Crystal reports, including setting parameter values, changing data sources, and exporting to other formats, including XML, PDF, Microsoft Word, and Microsoft Excel.

Crystal Reports 2025 Processing Server:

The following are the features of the Crystal Reports 2025 Processing Server:

• Responds to page requests from Crystal Reports 2025 reports.

• Retrieves data for the report.

• Generates the report and converts the data to encapsulated page format (EPF) files.

• EPF files are sent to the Crystal Reports Cache Server.

• EPF supports page-on-demand, so only the asked page is returned, not the entire report.

• Improves system performance and reduces unnecessary network traffic.

The table shows various services available in the Crystal Reports Services category and how these services are used.

Crystal Reports Cache Server is a mandatory server to put in cache a report page to be displayed to users. If the Crystal Reports Cache Server is stopped, only stored pages in its cache can still be viewed by users (not the other pages).

Crystal Reports Cache Service:

Crystal Reports Cache Server handles the storage and retrieval of cached reports. Administrator needs to allocate sufficient resources such as memory and disk space for the Cache Files Directory.

Crystal Reports 2025 Processing Server is used to generate a new page file (.EPF file) to be sent to the Crystal Reports Cache Server. If the Crystal Reports 2025 Processing Server is stopped, no new page file (.EPF file) can be generated and sent to the Crystal Reports Cache Server, so the viewing request for a new page by the user will fail.

Crystal Reports 2025 Processing Service:

• Setting the maximum concurrent jobs to 0 means there is no enforced limit on the number of concurrent jobs.
• In other words, the server can handle unlimited number of concurrent jobs. Administrator needs to confirm if sufficient resources are available.
• If resources are not sufficient, this will affect SAP BusinessObjects BI Platform 2025 performance and responsiveness.