Thursday, 19 August 2010

Crystal strikes back!

Back in the late 90's virtually every bespoke app and a huge number of off the shelf applications that needed to print used one system, Crystal Reports.
For its time Crystal was a god send, creating a report for printing wasn't the most straight forward task in a project and could take days - even weeks for complex reports.
Crystal, however, made the job easy and even the most complex reports to be printed on pre-printed stationary would only take a you a few hours. However while it was a gift from the heavens for developers like myself it did have one seriously annoying drawback, installing it on your users computer.
I don't think I ever spent the time to find out exactly what Crystal's issue was with installing and why it spat out a stream of errors during a standard install but generally it can be fixed with just a few simple commands:

First ignore the errors generated by crystal during the install and then open Command Prompt and type:

> cd %SYSTEMROOT%\System32
or
> cd %SYSTEMROOT%\SysWow64
On 64 Bit systems

> regsrv32 crystl32.ocx


If everything Cyrstal needs has been installed and the regsvr32 successfully registers the Crystal COM control most of the problems it had during install should be now fixed.

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