Managing external Crystal Reports

Dashboard Builder is a Business Intelligence application that can display reports from external sources, such as Crystal Reports. Before users can build dashboards that contain Crystal Reports, you must do the following:

Enable Crystal Reporting
Identify the external report locations
Assign the roles that have access to the reports

Because Crystal Reports are created outside the Dashboard Builder environment, you cannot make changes to these reports in Dashboard Builder.

Linking external Crystal Report locations

Before users can include Crystal Reports in dashboards, you must link all report locations to Dashboard Builder.

To link the external Crystal Reports location to Dashboard Builder, follow these steps:

Go to Menu > Dashboards > Dashboard Admin > External Reports Manager.
The External Reports Manager page opens.
In the Report Folder Location field, enter the location of your Crystal Reports (for example, C:\Crystal Reports)

Note: Dashboard Builder must have permission to access the folder containing the Crystal Reports. If it does not have access, it displays a message stating, "Please verify the application has been granted access to the directory you are adding and that the directory path is correct." If you receive this error message, contact your system administrator.
Click Save.
The folder location is added to the External Reports grid.

To view a list of available reports, click the External Reports tab.

Assigning roles to Crystal Reports

Before users can include Crystal Reports in dashboards, you must assign roles to the report location(s).

To assign roles to Crystal Reports, follow these steps:

Go to Menu > Dashboards > Dashboard Admin > External Reports Manager.
The External Reports Manager page opens.
In the External Reports grid, select the folder location you want to edit.
Click Edit Properties.
The Edit External Report Location Properties pop-up window opens.
In the Viewer Roles field, select the role(s) that will have access to Crystal Reports in Dashboard Builder.
Click Save.
A message displays at the top of the page confirming the updates.

Click Cancel to close this window without saving your changes.

Deleting Crystal Report locations

As your company changes, its Crystal Report locations may change. As a best practice, you should remove Crystal Report locations that are no longer valid.

To delete a Crystal Report location, follow these steps:

Go to Menu > Dashboards > Dashboard Admin > External Reports Manager.
The External Reports Manager page opens.
Select the location you want to delete.
Click Delete.

Note: When you delete locations, you do not remove them from the Dashboard Builder database. Instead, the Deleted field value changes from N to Y.

If you do not want to see deleted locations in the grid, click Hide Deleted Locations. Note the name changes to Show Deleted Locations. This allows you to toggle between showing deleted locations and hiding deleted locations.