Crystal Migration Services - Your #1 Choice to Convert Crystal Reports to SSRS

• Download the conversion samples - 282.4 KB

For more samples, go to our Samples page:
http://www.crystalmigration.com/Samples.aspx

The Conversion Problem 

With the sample download, people can download the samples directly from CodeProject site to have a try. There are hundreds of millions of Crystal Reports in the world. Even in the face of that level of market dominance, the SSRS format provides significant advantages:

• SSRS comes free if you have SQL Server. Compare that to the high licensing fees required to support Crystal Reports.
• SRSS provides better features.

These reasons are driving more and more customers away from Crystal Reports™ and towards SSRS, creating a growing demand to convert legacy reports to the SSRS format.

If you do your conversions in-house, it can be inconvenient and probably consume more time and manpower than you want to spend. For example, Crystal Reports is a binary format, so the business logic must be preserved along with all the necessary formatting and layout. This can make manual conversion to SSRS a rather daunting task. Working on a tight deadline and with limited resources can further add to your headaches.

Third-party outsourcing comes with its own risks. Some companies will offer you a full conversion package, but you will probably pay too much and have to expose your database to them. Other companies may offer you an easy-to-use automatic conversion option, promising rapid turn-around and a low price, but you may find that the quality of the converted data is so poor that your development team will end up pulling their hair out struggling to fix conversion issues that the automatic solution left behind.

You need a solution that lets you speed up the conversion process, lower your costs, and avoid errors and inaccuracies.

You Need a Better Solution - Crystal Migration Services

Crystal Migration Services provides leading-edge conversion services that get the job done in seconds, and with a level of accuracy that other companies just don't have. We support both SSRS 2008 and 2005, and we promise conversions that are precise. In fact, our conversion accuracy and capability set us apart in the industry. Our automatic solutions convert features that the other guys have to do by hand: crosstab, specified order grouping, conditional formatting, section coloring, field highlighting and more...

Getting it right the first time means significantly lower conversion costs because of little or no manual correction after the conversion.

Here are some of our advantages:

• Unbelievable Accuracy: For regular reports requiring only SSRS-supported features, our Advanced Automatic Conversion can be over 99% accurate! Often, our converted reports are ready to use with little or no manual tweaking.
• Rapid Conversion Services: Most reports can be converted in a second!
• Expert Full Conversion Services: If you have a strong development team, our Advanced Conversion is your best choice. We can also work with your team on a full conversion service to help get your job done quickly, and to your standards. We work with your team to provide thorough testing.
• Your Data stays secure, not exposed: We usually do not need your database for the Advanced or Full conversions.
• Proven Success with customers around the world: Our customers come from all sectors: government, software, finance, banking, insurance, etc. No matter which business you are in and how complicated your reports may be, we can convert you.
• Get a Free sample conversion and see: With a free sample conversion, you can compare our solution to anyone. Once you let us convert you, we're confident that you'll never go anywhere else.

We've helped many customers successfully convert their Crystal Reports to SSRS.

Thomas Bloss of 5280 Solutions:
"We were able to quickly turn around migrated reports (from crystal) to MS SSRS 2008 with very little work needed. The reports contained a large amount of business logic that would have taken us months to rewrite in SSRS""

To give you a general idea of what we can do, let's look at two samples:

The following two samples are regular reports and not very complicated, however more demanding reports can be translated just as easily and with the same high degree of fidelity. Both reports have been converted using our Advanced Automatic Conversion. Absolutely no manual fixes were required on the converted data.

Download these two samples and have a look. They're ready to work and good to go.

The database connection uses the DSN "Xtreme Sample Database 2005", which comes from Visual Studio 2005 - if you have Crystal Reports for Visual Studio 2005 installed. (If you do not have this DB, you may download it from the website and fix the DB connection.)

Sample Conversion One

First let's look at the original report in Crystal:

 

Next, here's the SSRS result from our Advanced Automatic Conversion, opened in Microsoft Report Builder 2.

 

You can see that this is a 100% accurate, complete conversion. The Crystal Reports version and SSRS conversion look almost exactly the same.

Let's go into more details on how the features are converted:

In this example report, you'll see record selection formulae, Grouping, Sorting, Running Total, Field Highlighting, Hyperlinks, Percentage summary, conditional section coloring, and other features.

1. Record Selection Formula: In the Crystal Reports, there is a record selection formula as follows:

        {Customer.Country} in ["Belgium", "Germany", "France", "England", "Canada", "Mexico", "USA"] 

  Here is the generated SQL. The Selection formula is well converted:

SELECT "Customer"."Country", "Customer"."Last Year's Sales", "Customer"."Region", "Customer"."Customer Name" 
FROM "Customer" "Customer" 
WHERE ("Customer"."Country" = 'Belgium') OR ("Customer"."Country" = 'Germany')
    OR ("Customer"."Country" = 'France') OR ("Customer"."Country" = 'England') 
    OR ("Customer"."Country" = 'Canada') OR ("Customer"."Country" = 'Mexico') 
    OR ("Customer"."Country" = 'USA')
ORDER BY "Customer"."Country", "Customer"."Region", "Customer"."Last Year's Sales" DESC 

2. Running Total field: Here is the definition of the Running Total field:

 

The conversion of the Running Total field in SSRS is as follows:

    <TextRun>
      <Value>=RunningValue(Fields!Last_Year_s_Sales.Value, Sum, "Group1")</Value>

      <Style>
        <FontFamily>Arial</FontFamily>
        <FontSize>10pt</FontSize>
        <Color>Black</Color>

        <Format>'$'#,0.00;('$'#,0.00);'$0.00'</Format>
      </Style>
    </TextRun>

You can see that both the Running Total calculation and the format are 100% converted.

3. Field Highlighting: In the original Crystal Report, there's a field highlighting in the color Red. If the field is greater than $20000.00, It will show in Fuchsia. Otherwise, it will just show in Black.

Here is the conversion in SSRS:

    <Color>=IIF(Fields!Last_Year_s_Sales.Value >= 10000.00 And Fields!Last_Year_s_Sales.Value <= 20000.00, "Red", 
            IIF(Fields!Last_Year_s_Sales.Value > 20000.00,"Fuchsia", "Black"))
    </Color>

4. Grouping, Record Sorting and Percentage Summary are all fully converted.

Here is the conversion for percentage summary:

   <TextRun>
      <Value>=Sum (Fields!Last_Year_s_Sales.Value)/Sum (Fields!Last_Year_s_Sales.Value, "Group1")</Value>

      <Style>
        <FontFamily>Arial</FontFamily>
        <FontSize>10pt</FontSize>
        <Color>Navy</Color>

        <FontWeight>Bold</FontWeight>
        <Format>#,0.00%;#,0.00%-;'0.00%'</Format>
      </Style>
    </TextRun>

5. Conditional Section Coloring: There is a formula for the detailed section in Crystal Reports.

        if remainder(recordnumber,2) = 0 then crwhite else rgb(234,244,255)

This formula is automatically converted to the Reporting Services expression, as follows:

        =IIF (((RowNumber(Nothing) Mod 2) = 0), ("White") , ("#EAF4FF"))

"Remainder" function in VB, it will be converted using the Mod operator. Since there's no data scope for the RowNumber, the recordnumber will be converted to "RowNumber(Nothing)" - so the scope for this case is “Nothing”. As for the color, in Crystal Reports, the color is an integer, but in SSRS, these need to be "HTML color" hex strings. So, we use the “System.Drawing.ColorTranslator.ToHtml(color)” to covert rgb(234, 244, 255) to "#EAF4FF" automatically.

In addition, picture objects are converted into external images, ready to use. Page paper size, page orientation (portrait or landscape), and page margins are all precisely converted.  

Sample Conversion Two - Yes, we can automatically convert Crosstab

Here is the original Crystal Report:

 

Here is the screenshot of the automatic conversion in Report Builder 2:

 

You can see that this is a full conversion and that nothing is lost.
Here are some details:

1. There are three crosstabs, and all have been fully, automatically converted. While these crosstabs are not very complicated, we can successfully convert crosstabs with many rows, columns and summaries.
2. In this report, there are 10 formulas, and all of these formulas have been fully converted to VB code. For the Crystal formula, whether it is in Crystal syntax or in VB syntax, we can easily convert it with the highest level of accuracy. (The only exception is UFL - some functions or features are not yet supported in SSRS.)

Here is a formula, quarter in Crystal Reports:

if Month({Financials.Statement Date})=3 then 
    "Qtr1" 
else if Month({Financials.Statement Date})=6 then 
    "Qtr2" 
else if Month({Financials.Statement Date})=9 then 
    "Qtr3" 
else if Month({Financials.Statement Date})=12 then 
    "Qtr4 "

Here is the conversion in SSRS:

        IIF ((Month(Fields!Statement_Date.Value) = 3), ("Qtr1"), IIF (( Month(Fields!Statement_Date.Value)
        = 6 ), ("Qtr2"), IIF (( Month(Fields!Statement_Date.Value) = 9 ), ("Qtr3") , ("Qtr4"))))

All of these samples, as well as those from our website, were generated from our Advanced Automatic Conversion.

More complicated formulas can be perfectly converted. Actually formula conversion accuracy is one of biggest advantages that set up apart from others. For more formula conversion samples, please go to the following site.

http://www.crystalmigration.com/knowledge.html

Conclusion

Now you can see why more and more customers come to us to migrate Crystal Reports to SSRS because we have conversion accuracy that other companies just don't have.

Gone are the days when you have to convert Crystal Reports manually.

Gone are the days when you have spend too much to get a report converted to SSRS.

Why wait? Why spend more?
Contact us today to get all your Crystal Reports converted to SSRS.

Seeing is believing. Let us convert you with a sample conversion.

Contact us

If you have any questions, our Technical Support Team (support@crystalmigration.com) is ready to help you!

For pricing or sales questions, you can contact our Sales Team (sales@crystalmigration.com).

You can also request a WebEx session with us so that we can discuss your needs and how we can help you.