Getting Started With Crystal Reports for PeopleSoft Enterprise

This chapter provides an overview of Crystal Reports and discusses:

Crystal Reports integrations.
Crystal Reports implementation.

Crystal Reports for PeopleSoft Enterprise Overview

Crystal Reports for PeopleSoft enables you to generate both standard and custom printed reports containing data from your PeopleSoft applications.

Note. Crystal Reports has many more features than are described in this book. See your Crystal Reports documentation for more information. Note that you must have Crystal Reports installed to gain access to this documentation.

See Crystal Reports documentation.

Note. Crystal reports in PeopleTools are language-sensitive.

See Working with Multiple Languages.

Crystal Reports Integrations

Crystal Reports works in tandem with PeopleSoft Query. You employ Query to extract specified subsets of data from your database. You can then use Crystal Reports to format that data, presenting the information in an easy to understand layout.

Crystal Reports Implementation

Crystal Reports implementation can be divided into the following phases:

Install Crystal Reports.
Create and save queries in PeopleSoft Query.
Create and save report definitions in Crystal Reports.

Installing Crystal Reports

You need to install Crystal Reports, which is packaged with PeopleSoft, if you want to design new Crystal reports.

Note. If you are simply using the Process Scheduler server to run existing Crystal reports, you do not have to install Crystal Reports. All necessary files are installed automatically when you boot the Process Scheduler server. For the most part, this book assumes that you have Crystal Reports installed.

Step	Reference
1. Install Crystal Reports for PeopleSoft on your PeopleTools Development Environment (a Windows-based workstation).	The PeopleTools Installation guide for your database platform.

Creating and Saving Queries in PeopleSoft Query

Before you can generate formatted output in Crystal, you need to create and save queries in PeopleSoft Query.

Step	Reference
1. Create and save a query to extract a selected subset of your data.	See Enterprise PeopleTools 8.46 PeopleBook: PeopleSoft Query.

Creating and Saving Report Definitions in Crystal Reports

After you've generated and saved queries, you can create report definitions in Crystal to format the fields (columns) used in the queries.

Step	Reference
1. Create the report definition.	See Creating and Formatting Crystal Reports.
2. Save the report definition.	See Creating and Formatting Crystal Reports.
3. Run the report.	See Running Crystal Reports.

Note. Crystal report definitions do not usually contain actual data from your database, so each time you use the reports, PeopleSoft Query retrieves the most recent data. This ensures that your printed reports always contain up-to-date information. However, if you want to track changes over time, you can choose to save data with a report.

Other Sources of Information

This section provides information to consider before you begin to use Crystal Reports for PeopleSoft.

Take advantage of all PeopleSoft sources of information, including the installation guides, release notes, PeopleBooks, red papers, the Updates + Fixes area of Customer Connection, and PeopleSoft's curriculum courses.