crystal report viewer shows blank screen

Thank you for priming this solution and for your terrific Crystal Reports forum. Using these 2 powerful elements (text object and separate detail sections), you can suppress each field as needed and remove the blank lines which are controlled by the Detail section expert “suppress blank section” check box. You have power to suppress a field and the power to suppress each line in the report.

Now, and lastly, to suppress any one of the separate Detail sections (each of which contains a text object field) so there are no blank lines in the report, open the Detail section expert and click on each Detail section a through e and check the “suppress blank section” box. You can also check the suppress box and add an X-2 formula to suppress the field if it is NULL or based on any other criteria. Check the “suppress embedded field blank lines” and the “can grow” boxes as Victoria indicated. Now, in the report Design tab, right-click on each text object and open the Format Editor. In order to have any one of these lines suppressed using the Text Object as you mentioned, one would need to put each line (field) in a separate Text Object, and also would put each text object in a separate Detail section as shown below:ĭetail a Customer_Name (which is a text object)ĭetail b Customer_Number (in text object)ĭetail c Customer_Addr_line_1 (in text object)ĭetail d Customer_Addr_line_2 (in text object)ĭetail e City, State, Zip_code (all in a text object) Based on your example, let’s say we have a customer name/address file that repeats as follows: There are probably a few other considerations, but I think those are the most important.įor the benefit of those in this forum, I wanted to provide what I found to be an effective way to remove blank lines (or lines that meet a criteria) in a repeating section. I have found a number of things that are a piece of cake in Crystal, that are very difficult to accomplish in SSRS.

Resources/knowledge – if you know Crystal very well and know that it can do what the report spec requests, but you’re just starting with SSRS, that may be a big factor in your decision.

Licensing – if Crystal licenses need to be purchased, that might be a lot more expensive than using SSRS which is included with SQL.

A report that needs to be presented to others (customers, board, bank, etc.) and always needs to be formatted a certain way may be better in Crystal. For example, a report with 25 columns with drill-downs that the users will want to export to Excel might be better suited for SSRS.

Report design and usage – some reports lend themselves more easily to Crystal vs SSRS.

I know both Crystal and SSRS pretty well and usually the choice of reporting tool depends on a number of things, not necessarily in order of importance: This is impossible to answer without knowing a lot more detail and it’s not always the same answer in every situation.

Crystal report viewer shows blank screen