Step by Step Tips - Analyzing which fields are used in your Crystal Reports using .rpt Inspector
Announcement: .rpt Inspector Professional Suite and .rpt Inspector Enterprise Suite are now in End Of Life (EOL) status.
.rpt Inspector Online, a new FREE cloud / SaaS product is now available
read more about it and try it out by visiting: https://rpt.inspector.tools
.rpt Inspector Online runs in modern browsers (Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome are supported, Internet Explorer support may be offered later) and supports Windows 7, Windows 8.1, and Windows 10 as well native support for Crystal Reports 2016 down to Crystal Reports 8.5 reports.
Impact Analysis
Let's take for example...- There's a field called Company Name in a table called Customer in 30% of your 200 Crystal Reports. You've decided to rename this field to Organization Name.
- The DBA has examined the reason some of your Crystal Reports run slow and feels that moving some of the logic to a stored procedure will improve performance but isn't sure which fields are actually used the Crystal Reports to properly build the stored procedure.
- You're migrating to a new version of your database or a new database server altogether and you're wondering if you can remove not used fields from the tables and/or views before the migration.
After you've learned how to analyze and/or document the fields that are used and/or not used in your Crystal Reports you can then use the Change data source / database migration and conversion wizard in .rpt Inspector to update the affected Crystal Reports.
That's where .rpt Inspector's Database Analyzer tool comes in!
With .rpt Inspector's Database Analyzer tool you can quickly and easily find the fields that are used or not used in your Crystal Reports.
I. Open all the Crystal Reports you want analyze in .rpt Inspector
Click here for an explanation of the .rpt Inspector user interface and an explanation of what each of the tabs in the Objects pane do.
II. On the Reports tab of the Objects pane or on the Reports Tree pane, from the opened Crystal Reports, select the Crystal Reports that you want to work with. In most cases, it would be all the Crystal Reports you opened.
Throughout the product, there are context sensitive right mouse click pop-up menus. For example, you can quickly select all Crystal Reports on the Reports tab of the Objects pane by right clicking on the grid on this tab to reveal a pop-up menu and then clicking on Select All or using the keyboard accelerator keys Ctrl A to do the same.
III. Click on the Database tab.
IV. Unlike other tabs in the Objects pane, the Database tab grid contains items that are pre-grouped by ReportFileName property and TableAliasName property. But for our purpose, we'll create our own groupings.
The properties on this tab are displayed as read-only. To make changes to the data source / database, or to make conversion / migration -- steps that Crystal Reports refers to as Change Data source / Set Location / Convert Driver / Verify Database -- you can use .rpt Inspector's Change data source / database migration and conversion wizard available in TOOLS|WIZARDS menu. The concept of this wizard is to work with one or many sources and databases and point them to one destination at the same time and therefore supports batch Change Data source / Set Location / Convert Driver / Verify Database.
V. In the filter, click on the drop-down and change the filter from Fields and Tables to Fields.
VI. Click on any field in the grid of the Objects pane, of the Database tab to have its properties displayed in the Properties pane (top middle pane) for the field.
VII. Click on the IsUsedInReport property label in the Properties pane and drag and drop this property to the grid on the Objects pane, the Database tab to create a new column dynamically in this grid called IsUsedInReport.
VIII. Right click on the newly created column IsUsedInReport and select Group by IsUsedInReport from the pop-up menu.
This will create a powerful pivot hierarchy which we call a grouping -- of all the fields across the selected reports based on the contents of the IsUsedInReport property. Each field used in the Crystal Report will have a value of true and therefore will be grouped together under the True group, while each field not used in the Crystal Report will have a value of false and therefore will be grouped together under the False group. Click here for a more in-depth explanation and step by step guide that discusses our Drag and Group concept.
IX. Expand one of the grouping(s) and click on the a field to have the properties displayed in the Properties pane.
X. Click on the Report Title property label (or Report Path if this is more meaningful to you) in the Properties pane and drag and drop this property to the grid on the Objects pane, the Database tab to create a new dynamic column in the grid called Report Title.
XI. With the expanded grouping, you can now see which fields are used / not used in which report(s).
Taking it further...
XII. You can now even Export the contents of this tab's grid with the dynamically created column properties to either a CSV file or an Excel .XLS file.
XIII. You can also add another level to the grouping by also grouping by the Report Title by right clicking on the newly created dynamic column Report Title and selecting Group by Report Title from the pop-up menu.
To change the grouping order (i.e. move Report Title down a level) you can right click on the grouping property label row (row that has a background color, i.e. Report Title) and you'll see options in the pop-up menu to Move the order around. The concept of drag and group can be applied to other properties and other tabs.
There you have it. These steps take only a few minutes execute. Now you can analyze and/or document the fields (and apply this concept to tables, views, drivers, fonts, colors, formulas, parameters, etc.) in your Crystal Reports with confidence! Whether it's one report or a couple hundred Crystal Reports at a time -- in only a few minutes the easy way with .rpt Inspector.
