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waylonatcimwaylonatcim 

Crystal Reports in Visual Studio 2010

I'm trying to create a .net site (c#) to display a crystal report that uses Salesforce data.  The problem is, when I try to refresh the data in the report, I get the following error

 Failed to load Database information.
Details:  The database connector 'crdb_sforce.dll' could not be loaded.  The correct version of the database client for this database type might not be installed.

 

So I locate the crdb_sforce.dll file on the machine (found in the Crystal Reports .....\Common\3.5\bin folder) and try to add it as a reference to the project.  This throws the following error:

 

A reference to 'C\.......\crdb_sforce.dll' could not be added.  No type libraries were found in the component.

 

I'm not really sure how to proceed from here.  I do not come from a .NET/windows world so I'm handcuffed a little on that. 

 

I'm wondering if anyone has gotten this working, or if it's a simple .NET error that someone would be willing to push me towards the answer.

 

Thanks

AlwaysConfusedAlwaysConfused

 

That looks like some sort of custom assembly.

Salesforce is entirely a cloud based product, there are no dll's installed on your servers / clients on your local network for salesforce.

 

I would suggest you consult the guy / company that wrote the "database connector" dll in question.

 

As for crystal reports,

Personally I would use SQL reporting services, it's more powerful and generally clicks better with everything in question.

(but that's my personal opinion of course)

waylonatcimwaylonatcim

The dll is part of the Salesforce driver for Crystal Reports that comes from SAP's website and I don't think they've updated it in a while.  My company is pretty heavily vested in Crystal Reports with other applications so I don't think a change is in the immediate future.

 

I will say that after this and other difficulties with the Salesforce driver I just started using DB Amp and building the crystal reports from SQL queries instead of messing around with the driver.  This has worked out much better for me.

 

Thanks for your reply.

AlwaysConfusedAlwaysConfused

I found the simplist way to work with salesforce data locally is to script the data loader.

 

You can setup these things called "beans" in an xml config file then using something like SQL integration services schedule the dataloader to run with the given config file.

 

This would effectively give you an entire solution for keeping a local complete copy of the SF database that you can then do whatever you need to in your reports.

 

I even built my own wrapper for the salesforce API which worked out to be faster but all things considered, it's easier to support the dataloader than it is some custom code.

 

Fair play on the crystal reports, I gather you can migrate from Crystal to SQL Reporting Rervices in the future should you need to, might be something worth suggesting in the longer term for your sanity by the sounds of things.