How do I to properly define createform director queue to Crystal server

Cathy Wilbur

Well Known Member
We have a Crystal server that does all of our Crystal report processing.

Our CreateForm server is on its own standalone server.

How do I properly define a Createform Director queue to the Crystal server so that when the output goes to that queue the output is placed on the queue then Director will pick up the output and process it properly. If we currently write from our Crystal server to our CreateForm director queue the output immediately disappears.

What we have had to do is write to a directory file on crystal. Write a script to transfer the file from our crystal server to our createforms server. Then I have the createforms server listen for files to be dumped onto the createforms server thru the use of folder monitor. Once folder monitor intercepts a file it dumps it on the director queue.

How do I properly define the director queue on the crystal server so I can eliminate the need to write to a flat file then transfer the file between servers then get folder monitor involved?

We are now using the newest version of Crystal (Business Objects).
 
Not sure if this will help but here’s my 2¢ worth…

On the Cform Director server you should have a printer defined and marked as shared.

On the Crystal server make a local printer using a TCP/IP port. Give it the IP address of the Cform Director server and the share name of the Director printer. Not sure what the windows printer driver should be, my guess is something simple like “Generic Text”.

Back on the Cform Director server, pause the printer queue then print from Crystal to your new Director printer. With the printer paused you can verify that the print job shows up and also check the contents of the print job.

When you see the print job on your paused print queue, go to Windows Explorer and look at the spool folder (by default this is C:\WINDOWS\System32\spool\PRINTERS). *** Be very careful in this folder. It’s the operating system print spooling folder and not intended for people to be mucking around in. ***

That folder will have a SHD and SPL file for every print job currently on the server. If you’re lucky there will be just the job you sent from Crystal. Open the SPL file with a text editor (Notepad or WordPad). What you will see is the content of the job sent from the Crystal server. I don’t know what you expect Crystal to send (plain text, XML or something else). If Crystal is sending data that Cform Director cannot read/process it could explain why your job is just “disappearing”.


Hope this helps!


Karen.
 
Thank-you very much...Will try this out and get back to this forum as soon as we test it out. You have been most helpful. Merci.
 
We defined our director queue to crystal and set it up like Generic Text.

We went to look at our file coming in from Crystal by looking at the spooled files and it comes in all shifted to the right. We cannot figure out why it is shifting our data. Secondly, we have spaces between our data lines where there should not be any spaces.

We defined the printer as generic text. What would cause these problems to happen?

We are using the new Crystal version called I think Business Objects. How do we standardize sending output from Crystal to the director queue when it does this to the data?

Before I entered this note we were having problems with the fonts so we had to add additional fonts to our createform server. It looks as though Crystal uses Arial as the font to do its export and at a size of 11.

Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.
 
What is it that you are trying to do with routing the job from Crystal through Create!director?

If you take a copy of the SPL file and use it as your Input File in Cdirector do you still see the text shifted with extra lines? When you do this what you see in Cdirector is how it’s going to see the file when it’s sent directly from Crystal to Director.

I don’t know what you expect to see or why you’re getting something unexpected. I’m also not sure what the problem with fonts would be since when you use Generic Text as your driver it basically produces a text file with no specific font information in it.

There’s a new utility with Cform v6 that wasn’t there in prior versions for looking at SPL files. The utility is Reprint Manager, it gives you the ability to view SPL files without messing around in Windows Explorer in the Spool folder. You can move a print job from one print queue to another but I don’t recall right now if you can save a copy of the file to a location you specify. You might still have to use Explorer to grab a copy of the SPL file that Crystal is sending out.... or change the printer to "Print to file".


Karen.
 
What we ended up doing is writing all our crystal report output to a specific directory. We then had a script written that runs every 10 minutes and copies the output from the crystal directory to a directory on the CreateForm server. We then have Folder Monitor listen for files in this specific directory on the CreateForm server and then it processes the data. It works good for us. We could not get around the problem of writing our output directly to the Director queue and having the job process so this is how we got around the problem.
 
If anyone was able to define a director queue to the Crystal server I would like to know exactly how you defined it to the crystal server so it works like a job queue NOT as a printer queue.

We are having some issues with our script that copies our text file from Crystal Server to our CreateForm server. For some reason the script cannot seem to connect to the forms server after a 20 day period.

Would like to know exactly how you defined the director queue to the forms server.
 
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