Downgrade a crystal report to an older version?

Question

I have a legacy app that can display crystal reports to the user, using the crystal component current at the time it was developed. Sadly, the version at that time was 8.5.

If I try to open an XI report in the old app, then I get an exception about not being able to open the report.

I'd like to show a Crystal XI report in that application. Is it possible to downgrade a crystal report to an older version?

It would be nice if I could open it in Crystal XI and do File->Save As->"Crystal 8" but of course it is never that easy...

Answer 1

The best you're going to get is to recycle the queries or stored procedures.

Answer 2

You can display 8.5 reports in the XI viewer. But, not the other way. Maybe upgrade the legacy app to XI?

Answer 3

Crystal Reports 9.0 changed the format of the reports to be completely Unicode compatible. They decided that it was too much work to try and convert all the Unicode parts backwards, meaning that all previous report formats were not able to be saved. Probably your only avenue will be to export the report to "Report Definition" file and to manually recreate it in 8.5.

Answer 4

If you also have crystalreports.com, I just discovered that you can upload the 2008 report to crystalreports.com, run it there and export it as a Crystal Report and it can be read by CR XIr2. I know crystalreports.com runs XI Server, so that may work there too.