Following up on my article on correcting disappearing headers, a further issue with our web-report is that even an export to Excel (Data Only) from Crystal Reports 9, created extra columns.  This issue could not be replicated on the client machine (ie. from my workstation).  I would have to upload the report to the server, configure the web application to use the newly uploaded report, export to a Crystal Report, which in turn we export to Excel:

Note that as this is from within a web application, there are no extra options or dialogs to select.  The export had to work from this point on.  I can't take any credit for the below as it was copied from http://hosteddocs.ittoolbox.com/ST030504.pdf.  A "Crystal Decisions" documentation.

If you've been to the point where you're exporting a report to Excel, and only some of the column headers appear, then try this:

I googled this for ages and found different suggestions here and there but none of them produced consistent results.  One solution was to untick "Simplify page headers" on the Excel Format Options when you export the report.  Because our report is exported via a web-based system, this extra dialog doesn't appear when our users export their reports.  Not that it solved it as only some different headers appeared on the exported report when we followed that suggestion.

Consider the following report in design view, only the circled headings would appear on the exported report:

I need to often be reminded of how to calculate a percentage.  The context here is that I want a progress bar in one of my programs.

(Progress So Far / Total Progress Units) * 100 = %
or
(Net Amount / Gross Amount) * 100 = %

eg. (12 steps / 30 steps) * 100 = 40%   ie. 12 steps of 30 is 40% progress
eg. ($8 / $10) * 100 = 80%              ie. $8 of $10 is 80%

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_web_browsers

Intro

I know there are a lot of articles on the WWW detailing this process but none of them really worked for me.  I recently changed job and no longer have all my test machines at work.  Instead I only have the one workstation :eek  Still I've been asked to test some web applications (???) so I had to find a solution to suit me.  I'd done this before IE7 (so a long time since).

My office workstation setup for this is:

• HP CMT DC7900
• E5300 @ 2.60Ghz
• 2Gb RAM
• Windows XP Professional SP2 
• Internet Explorer 7

As you can tell, not the most up-to-date but unfortunately I need to stay near to my customer base and match their setups as closely as possible.

Basically I thought that the regional settings of a report generated using Report Builder 2.0 on a MS SQL Server 2008 instance were dependent on either the server or the client machine.  Realised that this was actually specified in the report. Here's a quick note on how to set Dates and Times used in parameter fields to UK format (dd/MM/yyyy).

• SQL Server 2008
• Report Builder 2.0
• BMC Service Desk Express 9.8

• Incident #
• Group Name
• Close Date & Time
• Assigned to Full Name
• Incident Type

Yes, well don't laugh, I could not find this on the WWW so I was obviously not using Google properly.  Anyway here's just a quick note on how to do if else statements in Report Builder 2.0

I'm looking at the following if statement:

If (MyFieldName = 0) Then
     Return 1
Else
     Return MyFieldName

Can be expressed as:

IIf(Fields!MyFieldName.Value = 0, 1, Fields!MyFieldName.Value)