What is and What isn't .rpt Inspector Online

.rpt Inspector Online - Public Beta How-to and Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
,
1

What is .rpt Inspector Online

.rpt Inspector Online is a cloud / SaaS solution that runs in a supported browser with seamlessly designed tools to document, analyze, compare, edit, and change your Crystal Reports. And unlike Crystal Reports which can only work with one report at a time, .rpt Inspector Online is designed to work with one or many reports at the same time. Click here for details on how .rpt Inspector Online works.

.rpt Inspector Online is the latest generation of .rpt Inspector tools for Crystal Reports. Evolving from our desktop .rpt Inspector Professional Suite and .rpt Inspector Enterprise Suite tools which have been helping Crystal Reports users, developers, and designers since 2001.

While it is our goal to bring feature parity with .rpt Inspector Professional Suite and .rpt Inspector Enterprise Suite desktop products where possible for reports stored on the local file system or network drives, there are a few gaps. The following tools are already available in .rpt Inspector Online:

Documentation and Analysis related tools:

Change tools:

With your feedback, suggestions, feature requests, and bug reports, it is our goal to make the above tools the easiest and feature rich tools for analyzing and documenting Crystal Reports. With your participation, the above toolset will grow. Use the following topics to post your bug reports, features requests, and comments:
  .rpt Inspector Online – Public Beta – Bug
  .rpt Inspector Online – Public Beta – Feature Request
  .rpt Inspector Online – Public Beta – Comment

What isn’t .rpt Inspector Online

.rpt Inspector Online has improved on many of the desktop .rpt Inspector Professional Suite and .rpt Inspector Enterprise Suite tools.

.rpt Inspector Online already offers many documentation, analysis, compare, and change / modification tools with gaps in making changes to some object’s properties (i.e. fonts, colors, heights, widths) and no editor / change tools for running totals, sql expressions, sections / areas, summary fields, selection formulas, alerts, and sort fields – although we continue to reduce those gaps – see our 2019 roadmap.

Also, currently, unlike .rpt Inspector Enterprise Suite, .rpt Inspector Online is unable to connect to the BusinessObjects BI Platform, BusinessObjects Enterprise, Crystal Server, or Crystal Enterprise environments to retrieve reports and any associated meta-data such as schedules, instances, database information, etc.

How .rpt Inspector Online works

.rpt Inspector Online is designed to be run in a modern browser (see requirements). While the user interface of .rpt Inspector Online runs entirely in the web browser, a helper application that runs on your desktop is required (known as: .rpt Inspector Online - Broker) to allow access to your Crystal Reports. If you haven’t yet, please review the Getting started with .rpt Inspector Online guide.

Q: Does .rpt Inspector Online retrieve data stored in your Crystal Report or from your database and store it in the cloud?
A: No, never. .rpt Inspector Online only retrieves information about how the Crystal Report is designed – its objects and properties (known as meta-data). For performance reasons we recommended to work with Crystal Reports that don’t have any saved data (known as Crystal Report templates) as those open quicker – but if there is ever any saved data in the Crystal Report we ignore it.

Q: When adding a Crystal Report to .rpt Inspector Online do you store the entire report in the cloud?
A: No, never. As noted above, .rpt Inspector Online only retrieves information about how the Crystal Report is designed and this meta-data is stored in databases in our cloud servers.

Q: Why does the meta-data about my Crystal Reports need to be stored in the cloud?
A: This is done for performance. Depending on the number of Crystal Reports you have, and the size of each report, it can take a long while for the tools to open each of the reports and retrieve information about each one every time you wanted to use .rpt Inspector Online tools. Instead, the meta-data about your Crystal Reports is only retrieved from the reports one time when the reports were added to .rpt Inspector Online (and any time the design of a report changes) and quickly queried by the tools. Most .rpt Inspector Online users add hundreds and some thousands of reports and work with multiple reports at the same time with the tools.

Q: How does .rpt Inspector Online work?
A: There are two parts to .rpt Inspector Online:

  1. The visual application (user interface) which runs entirely in a supported browser. There’s never a need to install updates – you always get the latest version automatically in your browser from our cloud servers upon login. This browser application communicates with our cloud servers and the .rpt Inspector Online - Broker (see #2 below).

    a. All user interface interaction is done via the browser. However, .rpt Inspector Online will communicate with the cloud servers and as necessary the .rpt Inspector Online - Broker. Although we recommend that you always keep .rpt Inspector Online - Broker running in the background, if you don’t plan on adding or updating reports, you may safely shut it down. Crystal Reports that have been added can now be accessed by .rpt Inspector Online directly from the objects and properties that are now stored in the cloud.

  2. The .rpt Inspector Online - Broker is a helper application which requires installation on your computer and is responsible for working with the Crystal Reports on your computer (local file system or network drives). It is designed to be left running in the background as all user interface interactions is done via the browser. For example, when you add Crystal Reports to .rpt Inspector Online in the browser application (see #1 above), this request is in-turn sent to the .rpt Inspector Online - Broker to process and communicate back the results with our cloud servers.

    a. The .rpt Inspector Online - Broker opens the requested reports, retrieves the report design information about the objects and their properties (aka meta-data) stored within your Crystal Reports template (never any data retrieved from a database or contained in a database) and sends only this meta-data to our cloud servers for storage in a database which allows you to then utilize the analysis, documentation, and compare tools against this meta-data without having to re-open each report every time. No report data is ever retrieved or stored in the cloud when adding reports and any saved data is always ignored by the broker.

    b. When using the change tools, i.e. the Change Data Source tool, the .rpt Inspector Online - Broker retrieves information about your ODBC DSN(s) and/or OLE DB providers for temporary display in the application user interface and then sends your application user interface selections to the .rpt Inspector Online - Broker for processing. All such processing is done by .rpt Inspector Online - Broker on your computer, so if any connections need to be made to a database, they are made directly on your computer. Only updated report meta-data information is ever sent to the cloud.

    c. Although we recommend that you always keep .rpt Inspector Online - Broker running in the background, if you don’t plan on adding or updating reports, you may safely shut it down. Crystal Reports that have been added can now be accessed by .rpt Inspector Online directly from the objects and properties that are now stored in the cloud.

3