HP Intelligent Management Center Standard Software Platform - Manual (Page 166)

Making the right design choices
This section offers design options and considerations that will help improve
the performance of your reports. The topics covered range from basic
suggestions, such as updating reports created in older versions of Crystal
Reports to the latest file format, to more involved decisions, such as whether
to use live or saved data, and how to use subreports efficiently.
When designing your reports, and especially when designing reports for the
Web, you should allow report users to drive the data they see. In other words,
display summarized information, so each user can navigate the report quickly
and then drill down to access additional data. In this way, web traffic and
response times are minimized, because only the data requested by the user
is transferred from the database server.
These are only a few of the benefits of designing user-driven reports:
• Report users gain interactive control over the type and quantity of
information they view over the Web.
• Data transfer and network traffic decrease, because only the information
requested by users is returned from the database server.
• When users need real-time reporting of live data over the Web,
user-oriented reports respond quickly and communicate efficiently with
the database server.
• Reports become more useful, because each user customizes the report's
contents, thereby creating a reporting solution specific to his or her
particular decision-making problem.
Using faster report formats
The quickest way to help improve the performance of reports created in older
versions of Crystal Reports is to save them in the latest Crystal Reports
format. Crystal Reports has been enhanced to process reports faster than
ever before: update your older reports to take advantage of these
enhancements.
To update the format of an older report, just open it in Crystal Reports and
select Save from the File menu. The older version of the report will be
replaced with a version 2008 report.
166 Crystal Reports 2008 SP3 User's Guide
Designing Optimized Web Reports 8
Making the right design choices