Known Limitations

Crystal Reports Designer limitations

• Report Summary, Parameter and sub-report Tab Font
  It is not possible to change the font used for the summary information of the report such as keyword, title.. as well as for the parameters and tool tips. This is actually a limitation of Crystal Reports as the designer does not allow such functionality. Also the sub-report on-demand caption font cannot be set from the API. Therefore, these texts are displayed using the system font of the operating system.
   
• Crystal Reports 8.5 Export DLLs
  While Crystal Reports 7 to 8.5 Viewer can display various character sets, the exports DLLs do not. If you need your users to be able to export Japanese, Thai, Korean... reports  into RTF, XLS, PDF... formats, you will need to use the Crystal Reports 9, 10 or 11 engine to perform the export.
   

Crystal Reports API limitations

Due to current limitations of the Crystal Reports API, the following known functionalities are not supported:

• Text objects with internal formatting
  Texts in text objects can have formatting such as bold, italic, colours…
  Formatting for the whole text object is supported; however translators will not be able to apply formatting to parts of the text belonging to the same text object.
   
• Tool tip text
  From Crystal Reports 9 and above, it is possible to set tips to objects in a report which get displayed when the user move the mouse on top of the objects. The API currently does not provide access to the tool tips.
  However, you can also use the tool tip condition formula to set the tool tip as shown below:
  
  
  Then it is possible to translate such tool tip formula in Crystal Translator by first enabling the property filter "Text Formula"
  
  
  
   
• Cross-tab tables and Olap cubes
  The current Crystal API does not provide support for extracting text from Cross-tab and Olap objects
   
• Right to left paragraph reading order
  The current Crystal API does not allow this setting to be set. Consequently, the layout mirroring of Crystal Translator transforms justified alignment into a right alignment. This setting may need to be set manually in Crystal Reports if text objects include simultaneously RTL and LTR text.
   
• Graph legends
  Graph legends can be edited manually in Crystal Designer from the Preview window. However, there is no API to read or modify such text.
   
• Page N of M
  The text of the special field "Page N of M" is hard coded by Crystal Reports and thus cannot be localised. We recommend that you replace this field by a text object in which you include the special fields "Page Number" and "Total Page Count". The end result would be identical but the text will be editable.
   
• Custom functions
  Crystal Reports allows the developer to create custom functions to re-use code between Formula. It is possible to define custom functions that would return text. Unfortunately the API does not allow the editing of custom functions.
   
• Cascading parameter prompts
  Crystal Reports 11 supports cascading parameters but no API exists to access them.

We expect that Business Objects will improve the API to remove such limitations.