Your representation will match one of the formats above and is noted as one of the following:

Enhancing performance
Now that we've examined some of the ways you can enhance both the appearance and functionality of Web reports, let's look at techniques you can utilize to speed up the performance of your Crystal Reports Web Server.

Report design
The first place to begin is the actual design of the reports themselves. For starters, try to keep a clean design. In other words, don't use a huge, extremely complex report. Avoid having one large report with several sub reports and links to multiple data sources when multiple, smaller reports will serve the same purpose.

Next, use record selection formulas to reduce the amount of data retuned by the Web server. In general, most end-users don't want large "gobs" of unnecessary data that don't apply to their specific needs. Adding parameter fields to your report allows the user to specify the data they want to see while limiting the performance hit to your server.

If you'll be reporting off of an RDBMS (Relational Database Management System) like Oracle or SQL Server, know that reports running from views will run more quickly than a report based on a stored procedure if you try to use an additional selection formula in your report for the stored procedure. This occurs because Crystal can pass the selection formula to the server with a WHERE clause when running on a view, so the server carries the load of processing all the records.

By contrast, the same report running on a stored procedure filters the records using Crystal's server, resulting in the report taking longer to generate. To take full advantage of stored procedures, you should add your selection formula directly to the stored procedure rather than the report.

One of the best ways to enhance performance of your Web server is to ascertain which reports need to have their data refreshed frequently. If any don't need this feature, you should choose to save these reports with data. This will add a significant performance boost when running reports in and of the Web viewers. To save a report with data, simply select Save Data With Report from the Crystal Reports Designer File menu.

The new Crystal Reports 8 Web Server has been enhanced to allow caching. Basically, when the server receives a report request from an end-user for the first time on a report with saved data, it will process that request and generate the report. The report's result is cached so that subsequent server requests for the same item are loaded from the cached copy. This results in much quicker retrieval time for end-users.