How to downgrade Crystal Reports to a lower version?

Question

I have Crystal Reports XI on my local machine and the server has version 10 I guess. When I tried to update the reports locally, before it saved, it warned me of the higher version overwrite. I said "continue" thinking that the server version would be upgraded as well to support the latest version.

It turned out that the server version won't be upgraded for some time from now and what that means is that I have to somehow downgrade my local Crystal Reports version to a lower version. I use Crystal Reports 2008 plugin/designer for Visual Studio 2005.

Would appreciate if someone can point me to the right direction on how to safely downgrade the Crystal Reports 2008 version to a lower version.

Thank you.

Answer 1

not really programming related.

you can't uninstall the later version and install the older version from scratch?

Answer 2

Crystal Reports are backwards compatible from current down to v9.

The caveat to using a newer version is that you are limited to the functionality of the Crystal Reports Engine used to run the report. For example, some of the drill down functionality was added between 9 and 10.

There's a multitude of versions within major versions - check the file or assembly version of crystal reports dlls to be sure which version you are deploying to, in order to research what functionality you loose.

Answer 3

You need to uninstall your current version (XI) and then install the older version (10). If you still want version XI you can then reinstall it.

You can have multiple versions of Crystal Reports installed on the same computer but they must be installed sequentially.