Crystal Reports Deployment Advice

[arrigob]

Hi There,

I just finished reading all Crystal Reports threads on this forum and see that everybody experiences the same when dealing with Crystal Reports.

First, a little background. We used RDC in our Clarion product for years without issue. We where able to embed the RDC report viewer into our software folder and distribute it that way.

Then we decided to upgrade to the newest Crystal Reports which was CR v12/2008 at the time. We found that we could no longer simply embed everything into our product folder. We found we had to install a Crystal Reports runtime redistributable package on customers as well as add certain dlls to our products folder to get the new crystal to work on client machines. We never quite rolled this out to our entire customer base and years rolled by.

Now we have decided to upgrade to the newest Crystal Reports 2011/v14. It seems we will have to do the same as we did in the previous version and will install a runtime redistributable package on clients as well as add certain dlls to our products folder. Crystal Reports now offers a runtime installer in the form of a click-once msi file and I am wondering what the easiest way to deploy would be. I am guessing I should just use a silent install of the msi during the install of our product, would that be correct. Just looking for a little advice. Thanks,

Brandon Arrigo

[linder]

Hi Brandon,

Just embed the .msi redistributable into your setup.exe and call it via the "Run Windows Installer (.msi)" script function. There is a msi2exe demo in the Examples Package.

If you need any help with this, just let me know.

Friedrich