Operation Manual

Designing Optimized Web Reports
Overview
8
132 Crystal Reports User’s Guide
Overview
Whether you distribute your enterprise reports over a local network, a
corporate Intranet, or the Web, you can use Crystal Reports’ powerful, built-in
performance features to deliver web reporting speed.
Crystal Reports automatically provides these major performance advantages—
even if you don’t apply any of the strategies set out in this chapter:
• Page-on-demand technology
Page-on-demand report access lets users download only the specific
report pages they need to see, thus improving response times and
reducing web traffic. Further, placeholders and partial page technology
allow you to view report pages and data over the Web immediately,
without having to wait for the processing of large objects, such as
graphics and subreports.
• Optimized, multithreaded Report Engine
The Crystal Report Engine’s multithreading capabilities and thread-safe
database drivers allow you to continue working on your important tasks,
while many other operations are processed simultaneously in the
background. The Report Engine also minimizes the number of passes
made through the data, speeds up processing with improved memory
management, and handles subreports and parameters as efficiently as
possible.
In addition to these built-in features, the “Key strategies for optimizing web
reports” on page 133 discussed in the following sections bring additional
performance benefits, which are often substantial. When you design new
reports (or improve reports created in older versions of Crystal Reports) in
accordance with these strategies, reports run faster and tie up fewer
processing resources. Consequently, report users can easily access the data
they need—faster than ever.
Tip: If you’re new to web reporting, or to reporting in general, reading this
chapter will prepare you for future reporting tasks—you’ll gain important
insight into designing faster, better reports.
Note: Understanding databases and how they work is often important when
considering performance. See “Databases overview” on page 484 for
background information.