Back when my company used Epicor 9 we had multiple Custom reports made using Crystal Reports that we are unable to use now that we’re on Epicor 11. Has anyone found a way to use old crystal reports in the new epicor?
Few things to note
We are on 10.2.500 and have Crystal Reports working. I am starting to recreate them all in SSRS though as I was told that they won’t work in Kinetic. I would say that doing this now rather than later might be a good idea. I will see what our settings are for our reports. I would say with my limited knowledge, make sure the report style is set correctly. I will follow up.
We are currently on Base Version 11.2.200.0 Actual Version Kinetic 2022.2.8, I was worried that we wouldn’t be use any crystal reports because of not having our data onsite. I was told epicor wouldn’t help with anything Crystal Report related so I don’t think I can ask them to upload the report.
I’m starting to recreate some reports, but until I can I would’ve liked to have something for my co-workers to use.
We still have a few crystal report forms that we haven’t converted yet. They are working in our on-prem 11.1.200.0 installation. Sounds like if you’re cloud based it isn’t an option.
Sounds about right. We are considering 11.2.100 soon. We are currently on-prem, but looking at going cloud-based. Good luck with it all!
Thank you guys for helping, Looks like I have to either find a way to migrate our reports, and recreate them
We upgraded to Kinetic Cloud in November '22. We have multiple custom crystal reports that work. We had to get a READ ONLY environment, which is a copy of the LIVE database, so that we can read the data using a DSN file. Epicor sent all the connection string info and all we had to do was build the connection in Crystal Reports. It works great. But please note, this only works in the SMART client and not the URL client. And only if your users can access the location where you store the report, i.e. a server share. So remote users without a VPN are out of luck.
And of course, you still have to install the Crystal Reports runtime on each workstation.
Here is what the DSN file would look like:
[ODBC]
DRIVER=SQL Server Native Client 11.0
UID=xyz123 (provided by Epicor)
PWD=password123456
DATABASE=saas1234_12345 (provided by Epicor)
WSID=WSNAME
APP=Microsoft® Windows® Operating System
SERVER=tcp:xxxxxyyyyy.epicorsaas.com,12345 (provided by Epicor)
Description=AnythingYouWant
Here is what the menu setup would look like:
There is an OBDC driver that reads ODATA.
How did you get a Read Only Environment? I thought it would be a ticket that I would submit but was told, “We do not have the ability to move your database to the read only replica as this will take time and outage processes in place.”
You have to go thru your account rep to get the ReadOnly environment. Of course, it’s at an extra cost.
FYI, we are in the GOV Cloud and there are very strict controls as to how it can be accessed. That’s why we needed a ReadOnly environment, and so that we can read from the DB and allow Crystal Reports to pull the data. If you are not in the GOV cloud I do not know if the same restrictions apply.
Interesting but wouldn’t the effort of updating the Crystal reports they have to use ODATA source be about as much work as rebuilding the reports in SSRS?
I had this same question/thought Randy.
But a person has to do what they have to do.
Maybe they are working towards converting them to SSRS.
Also I’ll give it to them, super proper to have a reporting database for reports that are not tactical, that don’t need timely data.
We are on Government cloud as well.
I explored the “Read Only” environment - however at the time (1 1/2 years ago) it was an additional $1,000.00 per Month. I don’t know if that is still true.
I decided to bite the bullet and rebuild the Crystal reports as SSSRS. I am glad i did because we were
forced to review the reports we “really needed” instead of grandfathering over a bunch of unused reports. We also are now able to use APR (Advanced Print Routing) for the reports (not available from epicor when using Crystal).
Totally agree there and possibly a necessary step for them in their SSRS conversion.
Same here, we did a initial round of listing all the reports and having people speak up if they used it. Any that wasn’t claimed were “disabled” by tweaking the Style so the report wouldn’t run. While we were converting the known used ones we found some stragglers and added them to the to-do list. Plus gave us time to rework some older reports that didn’t fix current processes any longer.
APR was a huge advantage to our users as well so they were happy to see their reports converted.
I wouldn’t think so. ODBC to ODBC is what they’d be doing. Just mapping some fields around.
I’m not suggesting it’s what they should do, just what is possible. I’d probably have to be in
their shoes to make real recommendations.
