ODBC Databases

Crystal Reports lets you export your report data into any ODBC compliant database. It creates a new record in the database for every detail row in the report. When exporting the data, it not only creates a field for every column in the detail section, but a field is also created for each report object. This includes the report header and footer, page header and footer, and the group header and footer. It exports the column headers along with the data. Since the column headers are static text objects, the data doesn’t change. The same data is repeated on every row. This gives you a lot of extra data that is probably worthless to you. After exporting the data, you will want to review the table design and clean it up where necessary. You’ll probably delete a lot of extraneous columns before you have the raw data you need.

The export options dialog box for ODBC databases is very simplistic. The first dialog box lets you select which ODBC connection to export to. This lists all ODBC connections that you have installed on your computer. Choose the ODBC connection you want and then you are either prompted for the file name (if it is a file based database like MS Access) or the table name. The default table name is CREXPORT, but you can change it to something more descriptive of your report data.