Crystal Enterprise is the leading reporting solution today. So why not use the NetBeans IDE to develop a web application for displaying and exporting reports ?

First of all we need a Crystal Enterprise Server with the latest service packs installed (i’ve some difficult problems and the solution was the latest service pack…).

Needed Libraries

We need the latest Crystal Java Libraries for development. You find this libaries in the directory «C:\Program files\Common files\Crystal Decisions\2.5\java\lib» of your server. You need all .jar files in this directory and the log4j.jar from directory «external». Copy this libraries to a local location, e.g. «c:\javalibs\crystal».

The documentation is located in file «C:\Program files\Crystal Decisions\Enterprise 10\Help\en\SDKDocs\java_docs-zip». Extract this file also to your local location, e.g. «c:\javalibs\crystal\docs».

Now we need the last thing from the Crystal Server: The Java Viewer. The viewer is located in directory «C:\Program files\Common files\Crystal Decisions\2.5\crystalviewers10». This whole directory must be available in your web application. It’s a good idea to copy this directory also to your local location, so you can copy it at any time to your projects directory.

Setup Library in NetBeans

Use the NetBeans Library Manager under «Tools -> Library Manager» to register the libraries. Name the library Crystal10-SDK.

Switch to register tab Javadoc and add the three directories CE, RAS and Viewer from the Crystal SDK documentation.