How do I export a Crystal Report to a Unicode text file?

Question

I'm trying to export a Crystal Report to a text file, while preserving any Unicode characters that are found within. By default, Crystal Reports seems to export to an ANSI text file.

Here is a highly simplified version of what I'm doing:

Dim objCRReport As CRAXDRT.Report
[...]
objCRReport.ExportOptions.FormatType = 8 'crEFTText
objCRReport.ExportOptions.DestinationType = 1 'crEDTDiskFile
objCRReport.ExportOptions.DiskFileName = "C:\reportInTextFormat.txt"
objCRReport.Export blnPromptUser

Since it creates a file in ANSI format, I lose any special characters that were found within the report. These characters are all fine when you view the Crystal Report directly.

Please note that I am referencing the "Crystal Reports 9 ActiveX Designer Runtime Library" specifically.

Answer 1

I want to point out that I've tried pre-creating a Unicode file with the same name prior to the export, hoping the Crystal code would notice the file, and append to it rather than creating an ANSI file, but unfortunately this is not the case.

I then thought I could get around this problem (ninja style) by just exporting to an RTF file (which preserves the characters), then reading the contents of this RTF (minus the formating). I would then create a Unicode text file myself, writing the RTF contents to it. Unfortunately, to achieve this, I had to look into using a RichTextBox, but encountered a slew of problems with that. I think I'd have more success in VB.Net, but unfortunately I'm stuck with VB6 for this task.

After trying those approaches, I found an article that seems to suggest that Crystal Reports 9 supports exporting to a Unicode Text file, but I have yet to see it work. It mentions that the print engine supports it, so I'm going to look deeper to see if I can invoke it, in case the .export isn't doing so itself (which I doubt).

It turns out Crystal relies heavily on the printer driver for Unicode support, so I decided to look into that. Turns out the printer driver had to support Unicode, and this was the case on my test environment. While this was interesting to find out, it didn't solve my problem - I already had a compatible printer driver.

So, finally: after a few days of trying to find a solution to this, my boss decided it was time to cut our losses, and we instead planned for a re-design of the feature, without involving Crystal Report to Text exports. I am still, however, very interested in how to export to a Unicode text file with Crystal - so please do answer if you know how.