The records that appear in my report will only contain those values with a factory equal to Virginia.

One nice feature of Crystal Reports is the ability to create parameter fields. These are user prompts that allow users to respond to prompts by the server in order to select exactly what data will appear in a report at runtime. Parameter fields can be used in formulas, selection formulas, and sub reports. The Crystal Web Server allows you to pass these parameter fields via the Prompt# command.

When using Prompt#, you must remember that values for parameterized fields are assigned in the order they exist in the report. You have the ability to pass more than one parameter field at runtime.

Parameter fields can be very handy when building a Domino-based reporting solution because you can create a front end to gather the query from users and then pass this via a URL command to generate the report at runtime or on refresh. The syntax is as follows:

So if I had a parameter field on my report that corresponded to the country, the syntax would be: Prompt0=USA.

You can also specify whether the end-user should be prompted for parameter values on refresh of the report by using:

If you use PromptOnRefresh=1, the report will automatically refresh and prompt for parameter values.

Choosing a viewer
In part one of this series, I covered the various viewers supported by the Crystal 8 Reports Server. If you're designing a reporting solution for an environment that might require restricting which viewer is used to generate reports by end-users, you can do so with the INIT Command.

If you don't specify a viewer using this command, the Web Component Server auto-detects the browser being used and provides a viewer for it.

Your choices for viewers within INIT are as follows:

For example, if I were to specify the Active X viewer be used as the Smart Viewer, I would pass: Init=actx.

Exporting reports
Crystal Reports 8 supports a number of export formats within both the standard reports interface and the Web Server. This is a very useful feature, because users often want the option of exporting data to another format. The Crystal Web Reports server can export data to the following formats:

• HTML 4.0;
• HTML 3.2;
• Excel 5.0 (.xls);
• Excel 5.0 Extended (.xls);
• Word Document (.doc);
• Adobe Acrobat (.pdf);
• Seagate Crystal Reports.

You can configure the browser to automatically launch the corresponding application after the export completes.

The syntax for the CMD and EXPORT_FMT commands is as follows: