Easy way for Crystal Reports to MS SQL Server Reporting Services conversion

Question

Is there a way to easily convert Crystal Reports reports to Reporting Services RDL format? We have quite a few reports that will be needing conversion soon.

I know about the manual process (which is basically rebuilding all your reports from scratch in SSRS), but my searches pointed to a few possibilities with automatic conversion "acceleration" with several consulting firms. (As described on .... - link broken).

Do any of you have any valid experiences or recomendations regarding this particular issue? Are there any tools around that I do not know about?

Solution 1

I have searched previously for this, with no luck. There does not seem to be any tools available for this conversion, the manual method thereby becomes the only method. And yes, there are consulting firms who will do the manual work for you, but they still do it manually.

Crystal Reports and Reporting Services have different architectural styles, making it a difficult task for a conversion tool, so I view it as unlikely that someone will build one anytime soon.

Solution 2

I work for one of those consulting firms mentioned by Carlton, and let me tell you that we are the only company to have developed an in-house (proprietary) tool that helps us jump start the conversion process from RPTs to RDLs. Our current tool only supports Crystal Rpts 9 and older, and the RDL 2000 and 2005 formats.

I have done several of these conversion projects myself, and there are lots of things that cannot be automatically converted due to the nature of each product. Things like expressions, data source information, and dataset queries just cannot be automagically "translated" by a tool.

Cheers.

Solution 3

An alternative would be to use a much cheaper reporting solution which can read Crystal Reports templates, such as (our very own) Java-based i-net Clear Reports (used to be i-net Crystal-Clear).

Note that unlike most solutions, we do NOT lose information such as data source information, formulas, SQL expressions, etc. from the original templates. Even charts are converted quite well.

Also, we now offer a fully functional, free report designer (which can also run reports).

Solution 4

My original VB code was converted to C#. See RptToXml.

Solution 5

We're in a very similar situation at the moment. Dozens of crystal reports in place and we're shifting to Reporting Services (mainly for its ease of deployment and more flexible UI for the end user) - our solution is to leave them be, but anything new is being created in RptgSvcs. Ideally we'd translate them, but the .rpt format is too opaque.

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