Some of you may experience problems when deploying your Crystal Report project to a shared server. One of the common problems that you will face is the inability for the server to display a graph. You may be confused as the graph displays properly on your local PC, but it is not working when deploying it to a shared server.

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Below are a few things you may want to check when you need to deploy a .Net 2.0 web application that integrates Crystal Reports:


Deploy Crystal components

First, and rather obvious, is to make sure the correct version of Crystal components are installed on the server. If you have the Visual Studio SDK installed, you can look for CRRedist2005_x86.msi, which is in this folder C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\SDK\v2.0\BootStrapper\Packages\CrystalReports on your machine. Running that installation on the server will make sure all components required for Crystal Reports are properly installed on your machine.

If you have a setup project for your web application, you can add a merge module to that project. Crystal Reports provides four merge modules for download at this location. Depending on your needs, you may need to add any combination of these to your setup project. Which module is required for your application can be found in this document on the Business Objects support site.

Web.Config settings

In order for a Crystal Reports viewer to work, the following settings must be added to the appSettings section in the web.Config file:

<add key="CrystalImageCleaner-AutoStart" value="true"/>
<add key="CrystalImageCleaner-Sleep" value="60000"/>
<add key="CrystalImageCleaner-Age" value="120000"/>

This will ensure that the temporary images for Crystal are removed when they are no longer required. The following setting must be added the the httpHandlers section.

<add verb="GET" path="CrystalImageHandler.aspx" type="CrystalDecisions.Web.CrystalImageHandler, CrystalDecisions.Web, Version=10.2.3600.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=692fbea5521e1304"/>

This is required, because otherwise all you will see is an empty box with a red cross in it.

aspnet_client files

Last, but certainly not least, check the aspnet_client folder in the root folder of your web site. This folder should contain a folder with the name CrystalReportWebFormViewer3. That folder must exist in the following path: system_web\2_0_50727. If that folder is not there, copy it from your local machine. It should be in the folder C:\WINNT\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\ASP.NETClientFiles.


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