The Workbench

Do you work with so many reports that it’s hard to keep track of all of them or even remember for whom or which department they were created for? The Workbench, located on the top right portion of the designer, makes it easy to organize and categorize a large number of reports. Within the Workbench, you create new projects and associate reports for each project. A project can group together reports for an internal project (e.g. Market Analysis), reports related to specific departments (e.g. Payroll Department), reports related to specific applications (e.g. SAP Accounts Receivable), etc. You can also nest projects within each other if you have different hierarchies of report classifications.

Figure 1-6. The Workbench window showing different projects.

The benefit of using projects is that when you are working on reports within a project you don’t have to worry about the dozens of other reports stored on your computer. By keeping them displayed within the Workbench, you can quickly edit and swap between different reports. You can also perform functions across all reports in a project such as running the Dependency Checker.

Reports are added to the Workbench in two ways. The first way is to right-click anywhere on the Workbench and on the pop-up menu select Add | Add Existing Report (the report must already be saved). The second way is to drag a report from Windows Explorer and drop it onto the Workbench area. You must move the cursor onto the Project’s name so that the name gets highlighted. Otherwise, it will only open the report in the designer and not add it to the project. If you later decide to delete a report from the project, it only removes it from the Workbench area and does not delete the physical report file from your computer.

With Crystal Reports XI R2, a report doesn’t have to be saved to be added to the Workbench. You can add the report you are currently working on. There is a new menu item called Add Current Report. Selecting it puts the current report in the Workbench.

Another benefit of the Workbench is that it lets you check for dependencies within all the reports in the project. It scans through all the report objects and verifies that all the hyperlinks and report formulas are valid. Checking for dependencies is described in more detail in Chapter 5.